Franz Wright Knopf ($22) by Dobby Gibson If you haven't made the connection, the very first phrase in Franz Wright's dust jacket biography makes it for you, introducing him as the son of Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet James Wright. This is not trivial background. As "The Dead Dads" puts it: It's easier to get a […]
Peter Blegvad The Overlook Press ($23.95) by Gary Sullivan I'm going to pick up on an argument many have made before, that there is such a thing as the "new comic" and that it occurs more or less on the outskirts of contemporary comics production. It's an admittedly loose term; for some the "new comic" […]
Jeremy Sigler Left Hand Books ($20) by Daniel Sumrall Tone is the second most engaging debate in the poetry world today—it unfortunately must take a back seat to the current preoccupation with "form"—and the reason for this is that as a device of voice, tone is what allows for genuine or unique imaging to be […]
Mary Leader University of Iowa Press ($13) by Arielle Greenberg Mary Leader's first collection, The Red Signature, was a breath of fresh air; adhering to no particular style, the poems were witty and warm, and as often abstract as forthright. This 1996 National Poetry Series Award-winner felt wonderfully free of the workshop influence, and indeed, Mary […]
Lissa Wolsak Roof Books ($9.95) by Jen Hofer . . . fuck puny fiction, pornocracy, and pandit classes, I emptied my purse and inserted a gnat o godmother I am mostly silence . . . distaff but it is not so as I have heard from that blindfolding eliminates stress . . . In Pen Chants, […]
Kirby Olson Texas Tech University Press ($29.95) by Brian Evenson In Comedy After Postmodernism Kirby Olson chooses to rethink comedy in terms of an aspect of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Literary criticism, argues Olson, has traditionally asked, in its definition of its canons, the question "What is great?," judging works on aesthetic terms. […]
Susan Neville MacMurray & Beck ($22) by Nicole Hamer Susan Neville's latest offering would like to be a serious meditation on manufacturing and meaning. However, somewhere in her journeys through the flat plains of Indiana, between the Veneer factories of Edinburgh, the Burley Tobacco auctions of Madison and the Industrial Goth night at the Melody […]
edited by Edmund White University of Wisconsin Press ($29.95) by Thomas Fagan Much has been written about the toll taken by AIDS on the artistic community. Especially in the early years of the epidemic, when the time between diagnosis and death was much shorter than it is today, it seemed that every day brought news […]
edited by David Emblidge Da Capo ($16) by Charisse Gendron Monday through Friday from 1936 to 1962, in a widely syndicated newspaper column called My Day, Eleanor Roosevelt told four-million readers her thoughts about public affairs and domestic life. The title of the column refers to its spontaneous, diaristic tone—"After greeting my children, we went […]
J. Paul de River, M.D. Edited with an introduction by Brian King Bloat ($18.50) by Jon Carlson Sexual murder still can prove interesting these days (depending on the creativity of the perpetrator), but for the America that had recently emerged from World War II, the crime was considered shocking as well. So one might consider […]