Pamela Petro Arcade Publishing ($25.95) by Lynnell Edwards In Sitting Up With the Dead Pamela Petro has undertaken a Chaucer-esque pilgrimage through the American South to report on the culture and the people who preserve it through traditions of storytelling. Hoping to understanding how the South has become that great national "Other," she explains in […]
Sheila Munro McClelland & Stewart Ltd. ($27.95) by Meleah Maynard When Sheila Munro was growing up, she and her younger sister Jenny would sit on the living-room floor and watch television while their mother, Canadian author Alice Munro, sat in a chair behind them reading a book. She was with them, but she wasn't with […]
Milli Graffi Translated by Michael Gizzi and Giuliana Chamedes Burning Deck Press ($5) by Chris Glomski Embargoed Voice, a sampling of poems by Milanese poet Milli Graffi, constitutes a one-off departure from Burning Deck's regular offerings of recent German and French poetry, though not from its commitment to bringing out works that are engaged in […]
Ted Joans Drawings by Laura Corsiglia Ekstasis Editions ($15.95) by John Olson As Buckminster Fuller once noted, one ball cannot zoom around alone in the Universe. Without otherness, there is no consciousness and no direction. If there were only one entity-say it is a sphere called "me"—there would be no Universe: no otherness: no awareness: […]
Pattie McCarthy Apogee Press ($12.95) by Catherine Daly A number of texts which relate to books of hours, heretic testimony, cabinet plays, and other early vernacular writing have recently come to press. Pattie McCarthy's new book, bk of (h)rs, joins Cole Swensen's Such Rich Hour and a new translation of Rilke's The Book of Hours. […]
John Yau Penguin Books ($17) by Tom Devaney John Yau's recent Borrowed Love Poems is a dazzling exploration of deft and unforgiving openness. The poems engage the reader with a wide and wild array of characters, disembodied and otherwise, with an imaginative and capacious use of the lyric "I." It is a collection fed on […]
Sarah Manguso Alice James Books ($12.95) by Susie Meserve In Sarah Manguso's debut collection of poems, The Captain Lands in Paradise, the captain never lands anywhere for long. Sometimes the book plods, often it soars, but there is a constant rhythm of touching down and lifting off again. If this is Paradise, I might just […]
Harryette Mullen University of California Press ($14.95) by Christopher Fischbach The centerpiece poem of Harryette Mullen's latest collection is "Jinglejangle," ten pages of the most fun I have read in, well, possibly ever: Ab flab abracadabra Achy Breaky Action Jackson airy-fairy airfare Asian contagion analysis paralysis Anna banana ants in your pants Annie's cranny Annie […]
Cyber Reader Edited by Neil Spiller Phaidon Press ($39.95) Hard_Code Edited by Eugene Thacker Alt X Press ($18) by Rod Smith The book is dead—or at least one book: Bill Gates's The Road Ahead. Dead on the market, that is. A cursory perusal of that vast online booksellers' clearinghouse, Abe.com, reveals that more than a […]
by Felicia C. Sullivan A dazzling debut, Snow Island (Macadam/Cage, $25) follows the dual stories of Alice Daggett and George Tibbits in a small isolated island populated by quahoggers and eccentrics during the Second World War. Towler weaves the two plot lines intricately, at the same time subtly relaying the nuances of the island's inhabitants […]