Tag Archives: summer 2011

ADDRESS

Elizabeth Willis Wesleyan ($22.95) by Michael D. Snediker Let’s be frank: the nonce-genre of political poetry often deserves the suspicion and flinch it sometimes solicits. To paraphrase Freud, what does political poetry want? Sometimes, the political event that a given poem seeks to articulate hamstrings a preference toward obliquity on which so much of our […]

THE NEEDLE

Jennifer Grotz Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ($23) by Sumita Chakraborty In Walt Whitman’s poem “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” the speaker talks about the titular arachnid who, “to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,” “launch’d forth filament, filament, filament out of itself; / Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.” This is what Jennifer Grotz does in her second […]

HELSINKI

Peter Richards Action Books ($16) by Kevin Carollo We were never to discuss it or perceive it why even to mention it in a dream meant death by expulsion but now I must speak it I have too much inventory as they say       —Peter Richards, Helsinki Half of what I say is meaningless. —The Beatles, “Julia” […]

MORE RADIANT SIGNAL

Juliana Leslie Letter Machine Editions ($14) by Amy Wright A red verb to prehend and absorb the management and flowering of flowers that place in boxes what they see of themselves regarding tomorrow We live, according to Juliana Leslie, “in temperature.” Her first book, More Radiant Signal, is a fingertip record of the current barometric pressure […]

WORDS WE MIGHT ONE DAY SAY

Holly Karapetkova Washington Writers’ Publishing House ($15) by Alyse Bensel Holly Karapetkova’s haunting debut collection tells of her experiences as lover, mother, and as a child growing up in war-torn Bulgaria. With a narrative sewn together by the poet into sections thematically centered on lovers, family, suicide, and home, Words We Might One Day Say hinges on […]

DICK OF THE DEAD

Rachel Loden Ahsahta Press ($17.50) by Janet McCann Rachel Loden’s major preoccupation, Richard Nixon, dominates again in her electric collections of poems, Dick of the Dead. In this book, Nixon is the door through which pours all the tattered and tacky debris of the twentieth century—politics, art, sex, lies, videotape. He functions, however, as a negative […]

THE CLOUD CORPORATION

Timothy Donnelly Wave Books ($16) by Stephen Ross Cloud seeding is a form of weather modification used to alter the type or amount of precipitation that falls from clouds. The procedure works by dispersing substances like silver iodide and dry ice in the sky, either by launching them in a rocket or dropping them from […]

DREAMHOUSE KINGS SERIES

House of Dark Shadows | Watcher in the Woods | Gatekeepers | Timescape | Whirlwind | Frenzy Robert Liparulo Thomas Nelson ($9.99-14.99 each) by Kelly Everding          Adding up to almost 2000 pages, the six books in Robert Liparulo’s Dreamhouse Kings series follow roughly a week’s worth of jam-packed danger and adventure for the King family, Mom (Gertrude or […]

HUMAN.4

Mike Lancaster EgmontUSA ($16.99) by Shawn Patrick Doyle Human.4 is a clever book by a clever writer, but Mike Lancaster’s greatest asset is that he understands when cleverness goes too far. In his first YA book, Lancaster relies on familiar conceits, but even readers familiar with those conceits will find pleasure in his creative attempts to […]

LOVE LIKE HATE

Linh Dinh Seven Stories ($16.95) by REDACTED [EDITOR’S NOTE: Recently (as of Winter 2020) Rain Taxi has been made aware of anti-Semitic and anti-Black statements by the author whose book is discussed below. Because of these abominable public pieces, the original reviewer no longer wishes to have their name associated with the author in any […]