Tag Archives: winter 2008

SHEER FICTION

Volume IV Paul West McPherson & Company ($26) by Jeff Bursey Paul West (b. 1930) is the author of over three dozen novels and nonfiction works, including Rat Man of Paris, a fictionalized account of a Parisian eccentric traumatized by the Nazis, and The Shadow Factory, a recent memoir about his battle with aphasia after a stroke. […]

A MESSAGE BACK AND OTHER FURORS

Leonard Schwartz Chax Press ($16) by Craig Santos Perez Leonard Schwartz’s A Message Back and Other Furors is a furious study of language and form. This book is divided into two sections: a 60-page serial title poem and a 7-page prose coda, titled “Coda (Red Fog).” The first poem begins: “Familiar ground is a foreign land,” a […]

SOURCES

Devin Johnston Turtle Point Press ($15.95) by Joseph Bradshaw In his essay “On Robert Duncan,” Michael Palmer posits that Duncan’s modeling of himself as a “derivative” poet—“a poet of near infinite derivations”—is “grounded in his conviction regarding poetry’s responsibility toward and derivation from the immediate world, that is, a world of multiple immediacies, socio-political, sexual, […]

THE GOLDEN AGE OF PARAPHERNALIA

Kevin Davies Edge Books ($15) by Steven Zultanski Kevin Davies has trafficked in disruptive formal entanglement for three volumes now. He’s a virtuoso of white space, using the blank page to punctuate convolutions of thought and utterance. Often this is a part of the poems’ humor, but just as often it’s a way to make […]

FRENCH SYMBOLIST POETRY | THE YALE ANTHOLOGY OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY FRENCH POETRY

FRENCH SYMBOLIST POETRY translated by C. F. MacIntyre University of California Press ($18.95) THE YALE ANTHOLOGY OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY FRENCH POETRY edited by Mary Ann Caws Yale University Press ($30) by John Herbert Cunningham French poetry, with its many movements from Symbolism to the Oulipo and beyond, has had a profound influence on North American writing: […]

BEHIND MY EYES

Li-Young Lee W.W. Norton & Company ($24.95) by Kristina Marie Darling In Li-Young Lee’s Behind My Eyes, hieroglyphs collide head-on with parables, burning books, and “breath to fan the fire’s nest,” setting the stage for an elegant collection of poems. A highly anticipated follow-up to the author’s previous four books, Lee’s newest work examines the many […]

THE GOLDEN BOAT: Selected Poems of Srečko Kosovel

translated by Bert Pribac and David Brooks with the assistance of Teja Pribac Salt Publishing ($20.82) by Martin Balgach Revered in Slovenia as an essential modernist figure and a formative avant-garde poet, Srečko Kosovel died in 1926 at the young age of twenty-two. A prolific writer, it is said that Kosovel wrote over a thousand poems, although […]

A GATHERING OF MATTER A MATTER OF GATHERING

Dawn Lundy Martin University of Georgia Press ($16.95) by Haines Eason a gathering of matter a matter of gathering, the debut collection from 2006 Cave Canem winner Dawn Lundy Martin, is an artful scar winding over broken bonds of trust—trust in father and family, trust in men and mankind. Starting from the recesses of memory marred […]

THE BALTIC QUINTET: Poems from Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Sweden

edited by Edita Page translated by Inara Cedrins, Eric Dickens, Herbert Lomas, and Edita Page Wolsak and Wynn ($25) by Amy Groshek It's easy to describe the seasonal changes one experiences when living in a circumpolar climate, but difficult to convey the impact of such changes on the psyche. One can describe the maritime chill […]