by Tom Devaney On April 10, 1989, James Schuyler wrote a letter to a young poet named Peter Gizzi. Gizzi had solicited poems from Schuyler for Gizzi's magazine O-Blek. In his previous letter to Schuyler, Gizzi must have asked, "What have you been reading?" Schuyler's reply included Frank O'Hara, John Weiners, Philip Whalen, and this […]
Thomas de Zengotita Bloomsbury Books ($22.95) by Weston Cutter Thomas de Zengotita's Mediated will fundamentally rework the way you see the world, which may in turn lead to fundamental reworkings of how you live in it. Perhaps the easiest way to describe what de Zengotita means by "mediated" is to say that everything in the world—every car […]
Joseph Csicsila University of Alabama Press ($38.50) by Raphael C. Allison These days it may seem fair to say that the great war of canon studies has subsided at last. Major combat operations are over; the world, or at least one very carefully policed corner of it in the university, has been made safe for […]
Joe Lambert Digital Diner Press ($25) by Will Clemens In 1994, Joe Lambert, Nina Mullen, and Dana Atchley founded the Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) in Berkeley. CDS helps people use digital media to tell meaningful stories from their lives through workshops held monthly in Berkeley and annually in a few other cities; the group […]
Ed Sanders Thunder's Mouth Press ($21.95) by Brenda Coultas The Wild Women of East Tenth taught me a valuable lesson that carried me all the way through the rest of the decade. I tended to be morose and always worried about things. Events, projects and decisions swirled around me in terrible turbulence. Nobody had any […]
Jeffrey Ethan Lee Many Mountains Moving Press ($11.95) by Marj Hahne Invisible Sister, Jeffrey Ethan Lee's first full-length collection of poems, is a daring act of language that delivers with grace the self inescapably splintered by language. In the book's prologue, Lee names some of the things that betrayed him, such as "whiteness," "pretty blonde," […]
Ravi Shankar Cherry Grove Collections ($16) by Neil Kozlowicz In "Fabricating Astrology," the second poem in Ravi Shankar's Instrumentality, he writes that the firmament "seems plotted / Along three axes: love, labor, time." And so it is here. Shankar's poems often begin by stopping time, by pausing in the face of life; from that stillness, […]
Gerald Stern W.W. Norton & Company ($23.95) by Maureen Picard Robins Disquieting, rattling, and turbulent verse fills the pages of Gerald Stern's latest book. Everything is Burning romps through the usual Sternian suspects: lovers (current and former), sex, wished-for-sex, sexual prowess, imagined sexual prowess, bad sex; paradise, pear and apple trees, birds, gardens; friends (dead and alive), […]
Cole Swensen Alice James Books ($13.95) by Erik Anderson The structure of Cole Swensen's latest, Goest, functions much like a single page: the book's three sections—entitled, "Of White," "A History of the Incandescent," and "On White"—mirror the format of "margins" surrounding "substance." Only there is nothing marginal about Goest. The book explodes the assumption of the "empty" […]
John Green Dutton Books ($15.99) by Cindra Halm James Kirkwood's Good Times, Bad Times, first published in 1968 and now tragically out of print, set the bar high for the "I went to boarding school and had a life-altering adventure" novel. John Green's Looking for Alaska meets the challenge: it modernizes the fish-bowl context of the teenage drama, […]