Tag Archives: summer 2010

I HAVE TO GO BACK TO 1994 AND KILL A GIRL

Karyna McGlynn Sarabande Books ($14.95) by John Jacob Karyna McGlynn’s I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, the most recent recipient of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, shows remarkable talent, even if it must be seen in the scrim of literary experiments performed long ago. McGlynn’s repeated use of columns of idioms […]

THE RAVENOUS AUDIENCE

Kate Durbin Akashic Books ($15.95) by Johannes Göransson Kate Durbin’s iconophilic, starving first book proclaims its poetics in its very title: Ravenous Audience. This is a poetics of a Plath-influenced engagement with the “peanut-crunching crowd.” If Judy Grahn’s famous “I’ve Come to Claim the Body of Marilyn Monroe” rewrites Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” as a grave-robbing, […]

WE DON’T KNOW WE DON’T KNOW | THE LIGHTNING THAT STRIKES THE NEIGHBORS’ HOUSE

WE DON’T KNOW WE DON’T KNOW Nick Lantz Graywolf Press ($15) THE LIGHTNING THAT STRIKES THE NEIGHBORS’ HOUSE Nick Lantz University of Wisconsin Press ($14.95) by Weston Cutter I. THE THINGS THEMSELVES Nick Lantz's We Don't Know We Don't Know and The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors' House are both phenomenal books—the former is the 2009 Bakeless Prize-winner for […]

DRIVE BY: Shards and Poems

John Bennett Lummox Press ($15) by Stephan Delbos In his poem “A Sick Child,” Randall Jarrell wrote, “If I can think of it, it isn’t what I want”—a line which should serve as a sterling example to young poets seeking words. John Bennett, who has published more than twenty-five collections of poetry since 1975, is […]

LONG DIVISION

Andrea Cohen Salmon Poetry / Dufour Editions ($21.95) by Warren Woessner Did you ever wish that you could read other people's thoughts? In a memorable episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy suddenly becomes able to do just that. The problem with this power is that it can't be focused. In a busy high school hallway, […]

RUMORED ISLANDS | FANCY BEASTS

RUMORED ISLANDS Robert Farnsworth Harbor Mountain Press ($14) FANCY BEASTS Alex Lemon Milkweed Editions ($16) by Raphael Allison Who speaks in a Robert Farnsworth poem? Whose voice is it that draws from the daily trudge such an attentive texture of observations: Sunwashed haze brings up the ruined river’s smell, slashed with mown grass and diesel […]

COLLECTED POEMS: Gustaf Sobin

Edited by Esther Sobin, Andrew Joron, Andrew Zawacki, and Edward Foster Talisman House ($27.95) by Lucas Klein Time was when moving to Europe for an American poet was a good career move. But the era of the Moderns and their romance of the self-imposed exile had ended by the time Gustaf Sobin—whose lifework in poetry is […]

GURLESQUE: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics

edited by Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg Saturnalia Books ($20) by Morgan Myers Anthologies tend to be read as turning points in literary history—forward-looking declarations of something just beginning or backwards-looking canonizations of something just completed. Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg, the editors of Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics, seem to anticipate that Janus-faced quality […]

BANG DITTO

Amber Tamblyn Manic D Press ($16) by George Held This is the second book of poetry by Amber Tamblyn, who is better known as an Emmy and Golden Globe nominated actress. Its title probably alludes to Pauline Kael’s collection of film reviews Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, shorthand for those Hollywood staples romance and crime. Tamblyn’s poems […]

FIND THE GIRL

Lightsey Darst Coffee House Press ($16) by Alyssa Pelish There is an expression, coined in a popular work of 1970s feminist lit crit, to describe the violence of reducing women to an aesthetic ideal: “killed into art.” It refers most pointedly to how such idealization deprives its subject of an existence outside the still life […]