translated by Andrew Schelling White Pine Press ($15) by Robert Milo Baldwin While we now have substantial volumes of translations of Chinese and Japanese poetry, the poetry of India remains less known. Yet India’s poetic tradition is as refined and concise as anything wrought by Sappho in ancient Greece, Catullus in Rome, Tu Fu in […]

Pascal Blanchet translated by Helge Dascher and John Kadlecek Drawn & Quarterly ($16.95) by Donald Lemke In his encore to the critically acclaimed White Rapids (Drawn & Quarterly, 2007), award-winning Quebecois cartoonist Pascal Blanchet delivers another refreshing piece of graphic literature with Baloney: A Tale in 3 Symphonic Acts. Originally published in French by Editions la Pastèque, this […]

Scott Morse Red Window / AdHouse Books ($14.95) by Adam Hall Replacing himself with an adorable cartoon tiger in his autobiographical graphic novel Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!, author/artist Scott Morse attempts to reconcile the responsibilities of adulthood with his own vivid and often distracting imagination. In a series of loosely connected anecdotes, Morse recounts, among other things, […]

Agamemnon by Aiskhylos Elektra by Sophokles Orestes by Euripides translated by Anne Carson Faber and Faber ($27) by W. C. Bamberger The first sentence of Anne Carson’s introduction to these translations is, “Not my idea to do this.” An Oresteia includes Carson’s translations of three tragedies, Agamemnon by Aiskhylos, Elektra by Sophokles, and Orestes by Euripides. Each presents one episode from the tragedy of the house […]

Nathaniel Tarn New Directions ($16.95) by John Herbert Cunningham Born in 1928 in Paris, France, Nathaniel Tarn became both a poet and an anthropologist. He brings both of these disciplines to the fore in his new book Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers, which he says “arose out of, and was written during, two months’ […]

Alison Stine University of North Texas Press ($12.95) by Erin M. Bertram Occasionally, the world splits open, revealing small animals and rusted trucks, constellations, stray dogs—familiar things you never paid much attention, now charged beyond memory. You like some of what you see very much, but the rest of it scares you, leaves you facing […]

Bernadette Mayer New Directions ($16.95) by Todd Pederson Like rutted footpaths, the poems coiling through Bernadette Mayer’s newest collection, Poetry State Forest, steers readers into the scrubby undergrowth. Indeed, Mayer’s poetry is so wildly overrun that the simple business of moving ahead takes discipline and effort—every root and leaf is suspect. Since Mayer often conceals intent […]

Radu Andriescu, Iustin Panta and Cristian Popescu translated by Adam J. Sorkin, with Radu Andriescu, Mircea Ivănescu, and Bogdan Ștefănescu Twisted Spoon Press ($15) by Stephan Delbos Essentially a three-part volume of selected poems, Memory Glyphsfeatures three contemporary Romanian prose poets, Radu Andriescu, Iustin Panta, and Cristian Popescu, translated and edited by Adam J. Sorkin, the leading […]

Clive Matson Regent Press ($22) by Tim Hunt Diane di Prima’s Poets Press published the original version of Clive Matson’s Mainline to the Heart in 1966. This reissue of the long out-of-print volume supplements the original twelve poems and the Introduction by John Weiners with fourteen uncollected poems from 1964-1966 and an Afterword by di Prima. Reading […]

Ariana Reines mal-o-mar ($15) by Megan Pugh Summarizing Ariana Reines’s Coeur de Lion wouldn’t do this thoughtful book justice—it might sound too much like a soap opera for the hip intelligentsia. But the dramatic story—a woman, Ariana, addresses her ex after hacking into his Gmail account—isn’t what makes Coeur de Lion such a tour de force. Reines uses the […]