Tag Archives: Fall 2014

Arrangements of Language: An Interview with Burt Kimmelman

by Eric Hoffman Burt Kimmelman teaches literary and cultural studies at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He is the highly acclaimed author of eight collections of poems. Kimmelman’s poetry has received praise from such notables as Robert Creeley (“a rare evocation”), Jerome Rothenberg (“a strict & powerful accounting”), Alfred Kazin (“artful, fastidious, learned”), and […]

Papers in the Wind

Eduardo Sacheri translated by Mara Faye Lethem Other Press ($17.95) by John Toren Argentine novelist Eduardo Sacheri’s career received a boost when a film based on his first novel, The Secrets in Their Eyes, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 2010. In Papers in the Wind, some of the same elements appear: […]

Puppets in the Wind

Selected Poems of Karl Krolow Translated by Stuart Friebert Bitter Oleander Press ($21) by John Bradley Some translators seem born to translate a particular writer; that’s the case with translator Stuart Friebert and German poet Karl Krolow. This is the third volume of Krolow’s work that Friebert has translated, with prior books published in 1985 […]

My god is this a man

Laura Sims Fence Books ($15.95) by Molly Sutton Kiefer What is not written is just as critical as what is on the page in Laura Sims’s My god is this a man. This book is a mash-up, containing the poet’s voice but also intruding voices, some of which we can tell (as when she quotes […]

Unfixed Elegy and Other Poems

Brendan Lorber ButterLamb ($7) by Davy Knittle In Brendan Lorber’s chapbook Unfixed Elegy and Other Poems, the title poem is full of tense twins. Here is work that experiments with living and dying as they double on themselves from the first lines: “Take shape OK give it back / sweet world or tempest above.” But […]

The Haunted Life and Other Writings

Jack Kerouac Da Capo Press ($24.99) by Steve Matuszak Legend has it that in 1944, a young Jack Kerouac left his handwritten manuscript The Haunted Life in a taxicab, forever lost to the tides of time and fortune. However, in 2002, the manuscript resurfaced and now, finally, is being published in The Haunted Life and […]

Last Words from Montmartre

Qiu Miaojin Translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich New York Review Books ($14.95) by Jenn Mar When Taiwan's most revered countercultural icon, lesbian writer Qiu Miaojin, committed suicide in 1995, she left behind what must be the most ambitious literary manuscript in history, a genre-pushing project that breaks down barriers between art and life, suicide and […]

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Haruki Murakami Translated by Philip Gabriel Knopf ($25.95) by Douglas Luman One year ago, amid secrecy surrounding the Japanese release of Haruki Murakami’s first book since his epic project 1Q84, readers lined up at many late-night booksellers in Tokyo to purchase copies of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. Anticipation was fueled by […]

Photobooth: A Biography

Meags Fitzgerald Conundrum Press ($20) by Jay Besemer Imagine yourself here, in a busy train station or perhaps a mall, staring with an odd and anxious longing at a vintage photobooth. Your heart lurches with the thrill of the forbidden, or something like it—as if you’re about to do something your parents wouldn’t approve of. […]