Charles Bukowski Black Sparrow Press ($16) by Mark Terrill It's astonishing just how many people, when they hear the name Bukowski, are ready to dismiss him, in less than a breath, as some sort of sexist, macho, skid-row bard, caught up in his teufelskreis of booze, broads, and back-rent, whose poetics consisted of nothing more than a […]
Alpay Ulku BOA Editions ($12.50) by Camille-Yvette Welsch Born in Turkey, raised in Canada, educated in both America and England, Alpay Ulku roams the borders of a dozen worlds, all without a home. In this first book, Ulku strives to find causal relationships within his world to provide metaphysical security and comfort. These poems explore […]
Barry Wallenstein Ridgeway Press ($12.50) by Stephanie Rauschenbusch Sly, wry, ironic, pitch-perfect for off-rhymes, these new poems in Barry Wallenstein's fifth book play with and tease out happy and unhappy endings. In the poem "A Measure of Conduct," a log-borne earwig is, after much thought, not consigned to a fireplace fire, though "in an absent […]
Tom Devaney Banshee Press ($10) by Joanna Furhman Tom Devaney's first book of poems, The American Pragmatist Fell in Love, serves as an antidote to the rarified aestheticism common in many avant-garde and academic poems. The details he includes have the "ring of authenticity" without the self-consciousness that term implies. These are playful, philosophical, subtle poems. […]
Kimberly Lyons Granary Books ($12) by Mark Wallace This enigmatic book of poems, quiet yet intense, draws on an intriguing range of influences to explore the relation between ourselves and others, people and things. The work has an understated precision of detail, as well as meditative subtlety, that consciously echoes the traditions of Asian poetry […]
Tom Sleigh University of Chicago Press ($12) by Jeffrey Shotts The Dreamhouse of the title of Tom Sleigh's fourth and latest collection of poems is a house divided. Between earth and spirit, pleasure and suffering, the dream and its reality, Sleigh's poems are restless assertions of ambivalence, spoken with voices almost assured as witnesses to […]
Cid Corman New Directions ($13.95) by Darrin Daniel Poetry becomes that conversation we could not otherwise have. Cid Corman's latest book, comprised of poems from the 80s and 90s, is long overdue. For over fifty years Corman, as poet, translator, and editor of Origin press, has delivered his literary mastery to poetry. His work is […]
Dana Levin American Poetry Review ($14) by Melanie Figg Dana Levin's first poetry collection and winner of the 1999 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, In the Surgical Theatre, is a true stunner, alive and pulsing in the reader's hand. The first section, Body moves from a darkly light telling of embalming Lenin's body to the more ghostly "The […]
PURE POETRY Binnie Kirshenbaum Simon and Schuster ($22) MAKING LOVE TO THE MINOR POETS OF CHICAGO James Conrad St. Martin's Press ($25.95) by Peter Ritter It was no mere oversight that your high-school guidance counselor did not mention "minor poet" as a potential vocation. Here is a career path, after all, that leads even the […]
Catalyst Among Poets Interview by Asako Kitaori Whenever Charles Henri Ford is mentioned, his name evokes the image of one whose creative genius comes in and out of focus: when, where, how and in what context. The name is easily remembered, yet what he's exactly known for has eluded even the most erudite observer. As […]