Susan Howe New Directions ($14.95) by Aaron Kunin "Admit that a character who is exiting can be seen only from behind . . ." --André Gide The final sequence of poems in Susan Howe's Pierce-Arrow is entitled "Rückenfigur," which means something like "figure seen from behind," although within the sequence it's translated as "retreating figure." This image […]
Kamau Brathwaite We Press and Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics ($15.95) by Anna Reckin Kamau Brathwaite's ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey is an extraordinary and provocative reminder of the possibilities of the interview, unfolding this hybrid form to embrace critique, explication, history, autobiography, performance, and poem (the capitalization of "vers" in the title is no accident). The main text (the […]
Michael McClure Shambhala ($16.95) by Wayne Atherton Stalactite Buddhist meditations descend from top center of each page, each poem a living organism, a biology of constant questioning. Here is evidence of a mind that is at once a bright beacon and midnight tidal pool; Pound’s natural object constantly made new; a love of all that […]
Lewis Warsh Trip Street Press ($10) by Gil Ott Collage is uniquely suited to twentieth-century European and American culture. Its operation mimics the basic perceptual function of gestalt, yet its insistence on the independence of its parts renders wholeness elusive. Where this phenomenon may have been previously regarded as a simple trick, like an optical illusion, […]
Arno Schmidt translated by John E. Woods Green Integer ($12.95) by Carolyn Kuebler This, then, my credo : directed against all the literal=airy men and aged seekers of textual variants, bundles of stinkhorns in their crippled hands . . . Weary of wandering wastelands of letters full of vacuous brainchildren and hidden in pretentious verbal […]
Ed Wood Four Walls Eight Windows ($9.95 each) by Kelly Everding Ed Wood has inspired an avid following—he even has a religion named after him, Woodism—and the reason may lie in his intense desire to weave fantastic tales. Four Walls Eight Windows has committed to reissuing the notorious director's pulp fiction, stories otherwise doomed to […]
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Beacon Press ($25) by Jennie Chu In this memoir of her treatment for depression following recovery from breast cancer, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick sets out to explore the poetics of therapy; in the process, the author, one of the founders of queer studies, examines her own sexuality—a topic she has heretofore been reticent […]
Gregory Benford Avon Books ($20) by Rudi Dornemann Physicist/novelist Gregory Benford has written a nonfiction book that circles around the idea of "Deep Time"—that is, the future far beyond the planning horizon for most human activities. Benford's argument is that we should develop a habit of thinking in the very long term, of envisioning the […]
Howard Mandel Oxford University Press ($26) by Jon Rodine Future Jazz is actually an unfair title for a book like this. "Future" implies a kind of crystal-ball agenda, an aficionado's index to what's ahead, or maybe a look at who's working on the edge of the modern jazz universe. But a good deal of Howard […]
Carolyn Kinder Carr Smithsonian Institution ($30.95) by Elizabeth Culbert Stop for a moment to imagine the abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollack at work on a canvas. More than likely, that image in your head is based on a Hans Namuth photograph. Between July and October of 1950, Namuth made more than 500 photographs of Pollack […]