Dennis Finnell University of Georgia Press ($15.95) by Daniel Sumrall More than ten years ago Alice Fulton introduced the concept of fractal verse, however few have been the poets willing or able to implement such a poetics without falling back into techniques more akin to language poetry, neo-confessionalism, or post-modern bricolage. Fractal verse reveals itself […]
Alice Notley Penguin ($18) by Dawn Michelle Baude Alice Notley's latest book, Disobedience, is a feisty, irreverent volume that gives the finger to many of the received ideas and unexamined assumptions inscribed in dominant culture. More discursive in many ways than other of Notley's recent books, including the Pulitzer nominee, Mysteries of Small Houses (1998) […]
Bruce Andrews Coach House Books ($22.95) by Joel Bettridge Lip Service is a sexy book, with its sexiness functioning both ironically as cultural critique and erotically as an exploration of desire. All uses of the phrase "lip service" are in play at once: as insincere complement (for Andrews, the ironic turning of social graces back […]
House Made of Silver Kelsey St. Press ($11) Harrow Omnidawn Publishing ($12) Elizabeth Robinson by Ken Rumble Elizabeth Robinson's latest two collections of poems, Harrow and House Made of Silver, are like the work of Brancusi and Henry Moore—intense meditations on fundamental forms. In both Robinson deftly treads the edges between the structure of faith […]
by Burt Kimmelman The creation of history—as this activity has been commonly understood since the beginning of the twentieth century—is, at heart, beset by relativism; the past is what the historian makes it out to be. Nowhere is this dynamic more true than in literary history, inasmuch as the initial literary past, in other words […]
by M. J. Fitzgerald In the last 20 years I have moved from the U.K. to Italy to the U.S., and there has been plenty of opportunity and encouragement to dispose of books. When I had to relinquish my flat in south London in the mid '80s, I was forced to be positively miserly; I […]
by Mark Terrill John Bennett is the founder of Vagabond Press, the former editor of the seminal small press magazine, Vagabond, and the author of over 21 books of prose, poetry and "shards," a high-octane, hybrid form of short prose pieces. He also edited Ragged Lion, A Tribute to Jack Micheline, and recently recorded a […]