Doug Anderson Curbstone ($12.95) by John Bradley "Love won't behave," opens the first poem in this book. And that sets the mood for all that is to follow. Here is a book of poems that "won't behave." At a time when publishers and poets seem to prefer poems that are so well behaved that they […]
Jean Valentine Wesleyan University Press ($12.95) by Craig Arnold The Cradle of the Real Life is Jean Valentine's eighth collection of poems, the latest offering in a thirty-five year spread, and a fine overture to Valentine's chemical wedding of old-school feminism and new-school poetics. Although she has received less attention than her more outspoken peer Adrienne […]
Jack Hirschman Multimedia Edizioni by Sarah Fox Jack Hirschman's Arcani catalogs, like a Book of Shadows, the various significant mysteries and losses collected in a life. Published in Italy, and translated into Italian by Anna Lombardo, Mariella Setzu and Rafaella Marzano, it's a lovely book to hold—as most books produced in Italy tend to be—absent of blurbs […]
Anne Michaels Knopf ($25) by Fionn Meade Whether slipping under the sheets as a late lover to the great Italian modernist painter Amadeo Modigliani or donning the seventeenth-century scientific cloak of the revolutionary mathematician Johannes Kepler, Canadian poet Anne Michaels offers a series of persona poems that ruminate and seduce with an erudite yet sexy […]
Carol Frost TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press ($16.95) by Jeffrey Shotts Carol Frost has long been one of the most interesting poets writing, and her latest book, Love and Scorn: New and Selected Poems, allows for a substantial look at her remarkable development. Over the course of seven books, Frost reaches higher and higher to the forbidden […]
Tom Raworth O Books ($15) by John Olson Several days ago I happened to tell a friend something I rarely tell anyone, because it's so hard to justify: if there is a work I really enjoy, I will frequently own more than one copy. I have, for instance, three separate publications of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons. […]
Charles Bernstein Sun & Moon Press ($14.95) by Patrick Pritchett Beginning in the late '70s as the co-founder of the seminal magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Charles Bernstein has exerted an enormous influence on three generations of poets now who have made it their concern to explore the possibilities of language as an instrument of social inquiry, philosophical speculation, […]
William M. Valtos Hampton Roads ($22.95) by Peter Ritter What happens to us when we die? Elysian fields or earthworm buffet? Since none of us knows and most of us aren't particularly keen to find out, we might do well to turn our musing to a more assailable but no less timeless conundrum: what happens […]
Felice Picano Alyson Books ($12.95) by Brad Jacobson Felice Picano occupies that rare constellation of literary talent populated by such stalwarts of queer literature as Christopher Cox, Andrew Holleran, and Edmund White. He began his career during the bacchanalian heyday of post-Stonewall queer culture, living in and writing about a universe suffused with the unabashed […]
Terry Tempest Williams Pantheon Books ($25) by Juliet Patterson “To objectify is to destroy," poet Hayden Carruth says, arguing that the best of poetry is always in the deepest sense, subjective. A poet "in the act of love," he continues, "existing purely and in subjectivity, in yearning and anguish, will transmute his private reference into […]