Christian Hawkey Wave Books ($14) by Samuel Amadon Though one often reads a book of poetry in its entirety to pursue an understanding of it as a whole, in the case of Citizen Of, Christian Hawkey’s lengthy second collection, this impulse develops from a more homeopathic insistence. A series of immediate pleasures—pleasures that progress comfortably with […]
Niels Hav translated by Patrick Friesen and P. K. Brask BookThug ($15) by Poul Houe Niels Hav (b. 1949) is an award-winning Danish poet, and We Are Here is a slim, respectably translated selection of his poems into English. With the bulk of its forty-five texts culled from a 2004 collection and the rest dating back to […]
Evie Shockley Carolina Wren Press ($15.95) by Nancy Kuhl In a half-red sea, Evie Shockley’s first full-length collection of poetry, the poet presents public and private histories through a series of narratives, lyrical monologues, fantastic episodes, and imagined dialogues. These stories are enlivened and complicated by the poet’s careful attention to form and by her imaginative […]
by Eric Lorberer The superhero epic may have reached its deconstructive apex with the 1986 publication of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s astonishing Watchmen, but its intricate latticework has strong roots in at least one group of comics from a decade earlier: the four simultaneously released titles from the early ’70s that comprise Jack Kirby’s so-called […]
edited by Melissa Chiu Charta / Asia Society ($70) by Carmen Tomfohrde Zhang Huan's performances and sculptures are not easily forgotten. Raw meat, blood, flies, nudity, animal hides, and ashes have made appearances in his brutally confrontational and cathartic presentations. His vengeance is potent, however; never underestimate the power of humiliation. An example of Zhang’s […]
Brandon Stosuy, Domenika Szope, Stephan Urbaschek, Matthew Barney Sammlung Goetz ($50) by Sean Smuda The primacy of the body as object—its fluctuations, trainability, aberrations, procreation, and death—is in a nutshell the Matthew Barney glass bead game. Self described as a sculptor, his five-filmCremaster Cycle (with its attendant sculptures, photographs, and drawings) casts him as many characters: […]
Danny Wilcox Frazier Duke University Press ($39.95) by Callie Clark-Wiren Danny Wilcox Frazier’s Driftless: Photographs from Iowa is the 2006 winner of Duke University’s Center for Documentary Photography/Honickman First Book Prize. Frazier’s images endeavor to shed light on the people and places that mainstream media neglects to illustrate. As rural economies fail, people and resources are migrating […]
Darby English The MIT Press ($30) by Christina Schmid Free to be you and free to be me—whether you look at children’s books or listen to presidential proclamations of the United States’ national values, American mythology teems with the idea of freedom; on an individual level, that includes the freedom to be who we are […]
Veronique Tanaka NBM/ComicsLit ($13.95) by Ken Chen Now, that surprising epoch, is an exciting time for the comics medium—but not for the reasons you think. While superhero movies sulk their way through multiplexes, many of today’s most thrilling comics are made by young artists who believe comics aren’t necessarily about respectable storytelling, but can present […]
Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá Dark Horse Books ($17.95) by Rudi Dornemann Every story must deal with the problem of how to keep the reader moving forward. In prose, where the line of letters leads off one page and onto the next, it’s relatively easy. But in media that marry words with pictures, there’s an […]