Tag Archives: spring 2011

BIRTH AND AFTER BIRTH – and other plays

Tina Howe Theatre Communications Group ($16.95) by Alison Barker In a 2007 interview with Mike Wood, playwright Tina Howe revealed that her influences were just as visual as literary. “I particularly liked the empty ones,” Howe said of Joseph Cornell’s shadowboxes. Her four-play marriage cycle, Birth and After Birth, could be characterized as a series of […]

DOWNLOAD HELVETICA FOR FREE.COM

Steve Roggenbuck by Morgan Myers To paraphrase Jay-Z, Steve Roggenbuck isn’t a businessman, he’s a business, man. Or maybe it would be better to say he’s a business model—one of the first to attempt to fully reimagine the promotion and distribution of poetry for the web. One of poetry’s first generation of digital natives, he […]

HORSE AND RIDER

Melissa Range Texas Tech University Press ($21.95) by Russ Brickey Recently, at a poetry panel somewhere in the Midwest, a traveler from New York stood up. “Where is the terror?” he shouted at the five poets sitting in front of the room. “We in New York live with terror. We have planes coming at us […]

BEYOND THE FIRE

Mary Leader Shearsman Books ($15) by Kate Angus Mary Leader’s third collection of poetry, Beyond the Fire, is the work of a restless and inquisitive mind. Rather than adhering to any set narrative or thematic arc, the overarching structure here is that of formal inquiry—the poet seems to be investigating what will happen if she eschews […]

APPROACHING ICE

Elizabeth Bradfield Persea Books ($15) by Lucy Bryan Green In this mesmerizing voyage to a land “more ice than earth,” Elizabeth Bradfield probes the lives of polar explorers, the people they left behind, and the desires that propelled them. She embarks on this journey “Because this life, this alarm clock time card / percolator direct […]

OUR CHROME ARMS OF GYMNASIUM

Crystal Curry Slope Editions ($14.95) by Greg Bem “What telling there is is always good . . . But, my heart holds out for a mobilization frenzy,” Seattle-based Crystal Curry carefully projects in the preface of her latest, most complete, and most completely disruptive book of verse, Our Chrome Arms of Gymnasium. Pulling the cover open […]

STEFAN AND LOTTE ZWEIG’S SOUTH AMERICAN LETTERS: New York, Argentina and Brazil, 1940–1942

Edited by Darién J. Davis and Oliver Marshall Continuum ($24.95) by Jesse Freedman When news of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union reached Stefan Zweig, his response was one of unyielding sorrow. Born in 1881, the celebrated novelist and biographer had already endured a series of profound upheavals: at thirty-two, his Jewish ancestry had forced him […]

THE CANALS OF MARS

Gary Fincke Michigan State University Press ($29.95) by Scott F. Parker The Canals of Mars, Gary Fincke’s memoir in parts, comprises five self-defining categories of memories (Beginnings, God, Work, Weakness, Endings). These categories, as you can just about tell from their titles, feature overlapping content and theme, but the organization allows Fincke to emphasize aspects […]