Trevor Joyce Shearsman Books ($15) by Harriet Zinnes To consider the poetry of the contemporary Irish poet Trevor Joyce one must start with a biographical fact: Joyce stopped writing poetry for about 20 years. And the reason was not biological: he did not have a strange disease, a fever, a loss of memory or a […]
Dana Gioia Graywolf Press ($14) by Michael McIrvin I have long been suspicious of poets who write in form because form runs counter to the world bequeathed us: we know the infinite reticulations of matter are as random as a thunderbolt, for example, and consequently our attempts to make it all cohere remain provisional by […]
Claudia Rankine Grove Press ($13) by Bonnie Blader Oh, action of narrative Oh secret plan To chart To chart A small piece of land Plot. Claudia Rankine mines the word thoroughly. Her armature for this engagement with emotional implications and consequences is an Ur-plot: married woman and man make baby. Her characters exist elsewhere in […]
Norman Dubie Copper Canyon Press ($30) by Joel Weishaus Norman Dubie was born in Vermont in 1945. He received the usual fellowships for those writers who toil in the fields of Academe (Guggenheim, NEA, etc.), and teaches at Arizona State University. The Mercy Seat, which collects over 30 years of work, including 21 new poems, […]
The Machine in Ward Eleven Four Walls Eight Windows/No Exit Press ($12.95) The Woman Chaser Four Walls Eight Windows/No Exit Press ($12.95) Charles Willeford by Kris Lawson Charles Willeford (1919-1988) grew up an orphan who attended boarding schools when not running away to ride the rails as a hobo. He served for 20 years in […]
A. D. Nauman Soft Skull Press ($12) by Justin Maxwell Fear and its relationship to the human condition is a powerful current throughout A.D. Nauman's first novel Scorch, but its depths are inadequately sounded—instead we get an unanalyzed Marxist diatribe. Scorch is a reductio ad absurdum critique of free-for-all capitalism. Its characters are pseudo-willing participants […]
Orhan Pamuk Translated by Erdag M. Göknar Knopf ($25.95) by Eric J. Iannelli In the wake of the September 11 atrocities, some booksellers have been eager to seize the prevailing fervour and stock their display windows with literature relating to Islam, Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda terrorist network, and the Taliban. While this is undoubtedly […]
by Kevin Sampsell Bloomsbury ($14.95) A couple of weeks ago I received a raccoon penis bone in the mail from JT Leroy. It measured over six inches long and one end was mounted in a silver cap with a tiny hole at the top. I was told to make a necklace out of it. Similar […]