Tag Archives: winter 2005

LANGUAGE IS

John Phillips Sardines Press ($10) by Richard Owens British poet John Phillips's latest collection, Language Is, is evidence of the consanguinity his work shares with American poets, particularly Cid Corman and Lorine Niedecker. His tight, highly condensed verse calls attention to language as a thing always already removed from that which it points toward. Language, as […]

AMERICAN GHOST ROSES

Kevin Stein University of Illinois Press ($16.95) by Jean-Paul Pecqueur In a world where life is transitory and contingent, loss is inevitable. This is one lesson we quickly learn in American Ghost Roses, Kevin Stein's new collection of poems. That the inevitability of loss need not lead to melancholy or to despair is another such lesson. […]

HERE, BULLET

Brian Turner Alice James Books ($14.95) by Joel Turnipseed Several hundred books have now been published on the Iraq War—some quite good, e.g. Generation Kill, One Bullet Away, and a few others—but none have felt necessary until now. There's something in the lumbering of prose that cannot capture what poetry, done right, can make immanent with its insistent beat—as […]

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF KENNETH KOCH

Kenneth Koch Alfred A. Knopf ($40) by Tim Keane If Kenneth Koch had an artistic credo it was play hard at poetry. Play hard he did, producing 30-plus poetry books over 52 years. This body of work has been posthumously collected into a nearly 800-page tome that the publisher has made only a little less forbidding […]

Al Franken is spreading The Truth (with jokes)

by Robert J. Nebel Al Franken is a powerhouse. This prolific 54-year-old satirist never seems to tire. Author of some of the most well-known political books of humor, including Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, and his latest, The Truth (with jokes), Franken seems to be a comedy factory […]

Interview with Lewis MacAdams

by Mary Kite I'm in Los Angeles riding around downtown with poet Lewis MacAdams, who is also chairman and founder of Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR). We pass by numerous buildings, barbed-wired hemmed chain-linked fences, narrow sidewalks outlined by exposed wooden telephone poles and a car that has recently caught on fire. I […]

Polemarchy: Urdoxa, Codex Obscura and beyond: an interview with Kane Faucher

by Astrid Jaida Kane Faucher was born in Ottawa in 1977. The author of two novels, Urdoxa (2004) and Codex Obscura (2005), which contains an introduction by Raymond Federman), he writes for both academic and literary markets. He is currently in the PhD program at the University of Western Ontario's Centre for the Study of Theory & Criticism. […]

TRACY QUAN: Interview with a Sex Trade Novelist

by Allan Vorda There has always been an interest in society's "oldest profession," yet despite our fascination with prostitution, for most people it's a life only visible from the periphery. Tracy Quan offers an inside look at this mysterious world in her Nancy Chan novels: Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl and Diary of a Married Call Girl. […]