Tag Archives: winter 2010

NEW EUROPE: Plays from the Continent

Edited by Bonnie Marranca and Małgorzata Semil PAJ Publications (22.95) by Justin Maxwell Strong plays built around socio-cultural uncertainty make up the anthology New Europe, wherein distance and isolation recur as trans-cultural leitmotifs. These works both stand alone and hang together, making for a very readable collection. Editor Bonnie Marranca frames the plays in a contextual […]

LA RONDE

Arthur Schnitzler translated by Nicholas Rudall Ivan R. Dee ($9.95) by Douglas Messerli Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, originally titled Der Reigen (a round-dance or roundelay) and published as Hands Around in English, was first "handed around" in a private edition in 1900, Vienna. The play, which follows the sexual affairs of ten couples, was recognized as too outspoken even by […]

HALLUCINATIONS IN THE ALFALFA AND OTHER POEMS

Griselda Garcia translated by Hugh Hazelton Wolsak & Wynn ($19) by John Herbert Cunningham English-speaking readers may not have yet heard of Griselda Garcia, but as the introduction to this bilingual edition informs us, she is “one of the principal figures of a young generation of Argentine poets.” Born in 1979, “around the time of […]

BREAK THE GLASS

Jean Valentine Copper Canyon Press ($22) by Mark Gustafson Jean Valentine is a quietly astonishing poet whose reputation precedes her. Her poetry has undergone changes since its debut in 1965, of course, but is equally marked by the continuity of its concerns and a distinct, clipped, semi-opacity. As Wallace Stevens famously said: “The poem must […]

OBJECTS FOR A FOG DEATH

Julie Doxsee Black Ocean ($12.95) by Paula Koneazny In Julie Doxsee’s Objects for a Fog Death, states of matter figure prominently: solids (ice/snow), liquids (water/rain/river/ocean), and gases (vapor). Fog perhaps represents an in-between state, the atmospheric conditions under which shapes become distorted and transmute. Of the four elements, water is primordial, but the poems also incorporate […]

CHRISTOPHER SUNSET

Geoffrey Nutter Wave Books ($14) by Nate Pritts Poetry that replicates the harried everyday consciousness of our deflated and depleted modern selves has been burning like an anthem in the heart of literature for decades. Recently this fire has taken on the added coloration of not just “plain speech” but what one might more rightly […]

THEORY OF MIND: New & Selected Poems

Bin Ramke Omnidawn Publishing ($16.95) by MC Hyland In a cosmopolitan society, “home” can be a difficult concept. For many of us, our day-to-day lives take place far from our communities of origin. We move for educational opportunities, for jobs, for more conducive political or economic climates. We move from the country to the city, […]

PITCH: Drafts 77-95

Rachel Blau DuPlessis Salt Publishing ($15.95) by John Herbert Cunningham Perhaps best known for her feminist critical works The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice and Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work, Rachel Blau DuPlessis has also created, as Patrick Pritchett put it in a review of Drafts 1-38, “one of the most sustained and magnificent meditations written […]

EXTRA LIVES: Why Video Games Matter

Tom Bissell Pantheon ($22.95) by Scott Newton Tom Bissell is sure that his yet “entirely hypothetical” children Kermit and Hussein will one day ask him where he was and what he was doing when the United States elected its first black president; at least for now, he promises to confess he was “wandering an ICBM-denuded […]