N. E. H. Hull & Peter Charles Hoffer University Press of Kansas ($15.95) by Felicia Parsons Is a fetus a baby soul? Who gets to decide the course of a pregnancy? These are the questions people ask when discussing—or, more likely, doing battle over—abortion. What is the validity of substantive due process? Is the right […]
Edited by Tonya Foster and Kristin Prevallet Teachers & Writers Collaborative ($19.95) by Thomas Bell When I wanted another mind I chose a visual one. Then I moved out into spatial, gestural, and visceral minds. Once started I found out these directions were rooted in experimental approaches to poetry that began roughly 100 years ago, […]
Richard Watson David R. Godine ($35) by Brian Charles Clark René Descartes' life and times have been gone over with a fine tooth comb. Within a few decades of his death, in 1650, the first biography appeared: La Vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes (1691). A steady stream of biographies have appeared since then—though none, as Richard […]
Katherine Monk forward by Atom Egoyan Raincoast Books ($18.95) by Brian K. Bergen-Aurand After only a few titles and a handful of directors, such as David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, Michael Snow, and Norman Jewison, many filmgoers' cachés concerning Canadian cinema run dry. Thankfully, Katherine Monk's book can alleviate that arid condition. Composed of thematically driven […]
Kevin J. Hayes University of Nebraska Press ($28) by Doug Nufer George Nellis (1865-1948) rode a bicycle from New York state to San Francisco in 1887. He covered 3369 miles in 72 days, setting an imprecise but impressive transcontinental cycling record. He rode about ten hours and wrote up to three hours a day, partly […]
Caetano Veloso Translated by Isabel de Sena Alfred A. Knopf ($26) by Dimitri Kaasan It is said that American pop stars are bereft of inner lives. So befuddled are they by the din of fans, their own personae as projected by the media, and the difficulty of authentic intimacy behind closed doors, that their faculties […]
Edited by Edward Foster and Joseph Donahue Talisman House ($25.95) by Chris McCreary In The World in Time and Space, Alan Golding's closing essay "New, Newer, and Newest American Poetries" surveys the numerous major anthologies of 20th-century innovative writing that all position themselves, in one way or another, as the true heir to Donald Allen's […]
Alicia Suskin Ostriker University of Pittsburgh Press ($12.95) by Julie Drake If a reader is very lucky, maybe once a year will she come across a book of poetry that will change how she views the world. As 2002 comes to a close, this reader is happy to report the volcano sequence is that book. […]
Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer Verse Press ($10) by Jen Bervin When Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer read together at the St. George Poetry Festival in September, they asked the audience to provide topics for improvised poems. Amid anticipatory silence that crackled with palpable energy, they took turns meting out a single word (or line, […]
Jennifer Moxley Edge Books ($12.50) by Arielle Greenberg Although it doesn't engage in the coy cleverness and pranks pulled by many of her "emerging" poetic peers, Jennifer Moxley's second full-length collection, The Sense Record, is absolutely postmodern, evoking a world in which Eros appears outside a two-car garage. It's also a hard book, the way […]