Nick Carbo Tia Chucha Press ($10.95) by Thomas Fink The "bare-chested muscled Filipino" Ang Tunay na Lalaki, "the real man" in Tagalog, is a seventies/eighties TV-commercial character transplanted to nineties New York City by Nick Carbo in his engaging second book of poems, Secret Asian Man. The book even comes with its own anticipated review, imagined by […]
Michael Heffernan Salmon Publishing / Dufour Editions ($12) by Will Clemens Another Part of the Island is the sixth book of poems from Michael Heffernan, whose Love's Answer won the 1993 Iowa Poetry Prize. With 31 poems comprising 43 pages, Another Part of the Island may look and feel like a chapbook. Published overseas, where Heffernan co-directs the International Writers' […]
Sharon Doubiago West End Press ($19.95) by Michael McIrvin Why write history and facts and story and autobiography in poetry? "Poetry is the true revolution," Rimbaud says, "that will end the discord between history and idea." —Sharon Doubiago Pound famously defined epic as the "tale of the tribe," and just as famously we stopped believing […]
John Ash Talisman House ($14.95) by Robert Kelly It is a curious thing that travel literature embraces two utterly different, incompatibly opposite sorts of text: those that illuminate jungle pathways and sea voyages, huge tense or flabby deeds of getting there, and those quieter texts that exult in the amenities—or writhe beneath the discomforts—of being there. A […]
Paul Violi Coffee House Press ($14.95) by Fred Muratori The publication of a Selected Poems is one of the two or three most significant milestones in a successful poet's career. Having a bona fide Selected—thick, filigreed with acknowledgments and dedications—means that you've made it, baby, and even if the poetry in-crowd had never read your […]
Teresa Porzecanski University of New Mexico Press ($17.95) by Jay Miskowiec Uruguayan writer Teresa Porzecanski embodies a lesser-known facet of the Latin American experience: the Jewish immigrant living amidst the continent's staunch Catholicism and Indo-African cultures. Raised in Montevideo the daughter of both Ashkenazim and Sephardim parents, she grew up in a polyglot world of […]
Edited by Sheree R. Thomas Warner Books ($24.95) by Rudi Dornemann Anthologies have long been important in science fiction and fantasy. Whether pulling together previously published stories or actively soliciting new work, editors can try to shape genre development by spotlighting groups of writers or kinds of writing, as Harlan Ellison did in his Dangerous Vision series […]
Anne Enright Atlantic Monthly Press ($24) by Amy Halloran What Are You Like? is the first novel published in America by BBC Radio journalist Anne Enright, and it is gruelingly beautiful. "She was small for a monster, with the slightly hurt look that monsters have and babies share, the same need to understand," begins the book, […]
Linh Dinh Seven Stories Press ($23.95) by Thuy Dinh “After Vietnam, however, Philadelphia will be possible again," the narrator of Linh Dinh's "Two Who Forgot" contemplates. Like the narrator of this short story in Fake House, since 1999 Linh Dinh has returned to work and live in Saigon—the city of his birth—to ponder the notion of […]
Books discussed in this essay: THE INKBLOT RECORD Dan Farrell SENSORY DEPRIVATION / DREAM POETICS Damian Lopes SPIRAL AGITATOR Steve Venright by Tom Orange In 1962, Stan Bevington left Edmonton to study in the Department of Fine Art at the University of Toronto, but within a few years he was spending most of his time […]