Laurent Binet Translated by Sam Taylor Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($26) by Christopher Urban Laurent Binet’s HHhH, a novelization of the assassination attempt of high-ranking Nazi officer Reinhard Heydrich, is written with a postmodern self-consciousness that’s uncertain of its own authenticity. It proceeds cautiously from the very beginning: “Gabčík—that’s his name—really did exist.” Composed of 257 […]
Louis Armand Equus Press ($8.50) by Benjamin Woodard Louis Armand’s Breakfast at Midnight crackles across the page like a cloaked drummer keeping time on a hi-hat cymbal in some broken down, forgotten nightclub on the wrong side of the tracks. A darkly radiant ode to the underbelly of Prague, the novel is a pinball fever dream, sopping […]
Lev Loseff translated by G. S. Smith ARC Publications (£10.99) by Amy Henry This bilingual collection of the poems of Lev Loseff begins with a preemptory acknowledgement, by series editor Jean Boase-Beier, of the difficulties of translating poetry, especially when a reader has no knowledge of the original language and thus might miss subtleties that […]
New and Selected Poems Charles North Turtle Point Press / Hanging Loose Press by Terence Diggory What It Is Like surveys four decades of work by one of America’s most engaging experimental poets. The word “engaging” has old-fashioned connotations that much contemporary experiment seems to repudiate, particularly in its critique of the subjectivity associated with the tradition of […]
Matthew Thorburn CW Books ($18) by Warren D. Woessner With a title like Every Possible Blue, you might expect Matthew Thorburn’s second collection to be a series of laments, but you’d be wrong. These poems are filled with blues—but they are the blues of blue skies, blue birds, and most emphatically, blue pigment. There are anthologies […]
Marjorie Welish Coffee House Press ($16) by Terence Diggory “Nature is a temple where living pillars / Sometimes allow confused words to arise.” These lines, from the opening of Baudelaire’s “Correspondances” (in Elaine Marks’s translation), provide the starting point for Marjorie Welish’s extended meditation on nature, architecture, and language in In the Futurity Lounge / Asylum […]
Bill Luoma Kenning Editions ($14.95) by Lightsey Darst Reading Bill Luoma’s Some Math is like facing a linguistic hurricane. Take these lines, for example: I’m calling the destructor on an iroq layer of inodes by inserting into the sidebodies of the multiplex of molly Iroq looks like Iraq, but is either a stock, an abbreviation for the […]
John Rybicki Lookout Books ($16.95) by Steve Dudas John Rybicki’s latest book of poems, When All the World is Old, is an emotional sequel to his previous collection,We Bed Down into Water (TriQuarterly Books, 2008). If that previous book was the fire searing the poet’s soul in the wake of his wife’s death from cancer at age […]
Kazuaki Tanahashi Shambhala ($17.95) by Justin Wadland Children flocked around Ryokan when he came on his begging rounds through the village near his home. To them, he was the monk who joined into their play as if he himself was a child. One of Ryokan’s poems expresses how he abandoned himself to such activities: Day […]
Jessy Randall Red Hen Press ($17.95) by CL Bledsoe Jessy Randall’s new collection begins with “Metaphors,” a clever piece that bucks preconceptions: “A duck is like the moon / because a kid can point at both. A house / is like the sky: both hold things.” The comparisons layer one upon the other until the […]