Amanda Boetzkes University of Minnesota Press ($25) by Deborah Karasov Since the mid-1990s, artist Chris Drury has constructed dark earthen spaces of rock, wood, dirt or branches, called cloud or wave chambers, in rural areas around Britain. Already intense and evocative, these shelter-like structures also have a periscope lens at the top, projecting vapor-like images […]
R. H. W. Dillard Factory Hollow Press ($14) by Greg Weiss At first glance, the most striking thing about R.H.W. Dillard’s new volume is its premise; as the inside-jacket copy tells us, this long-awaited seventh collection consists of a sequence of fifty-two poems, each sixteen lines long, each addressed to a dead poet or several […]
Martin Corless-Smith Fence Books ($18.95) by Daniel Tiffany Martin Corless-Smith’s fifth collection of poetry, English Fragments: A Brief History of the Soul, is a deeply companionable book; I was touched by its musicality, its powers of reflection, its candor, its sensuality, its intellectual tastes, but also by its sympathetic and contagious magic: the ability to gather into […]
Susan Briante Ahsahta Press ($17.50) by Abby Travis Utopia Minus is built on a subtle but pervasive distinction. Susan Briante takes her title from Robert Smithson’s A Guide to the Monuments of Passaic New Jersey, in which Smithson discusses a “ruins in reverse,” where “the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built. […]
Edited by Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo The MIT Press ($34.95) by Gary Sullivan If, as according to the Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, “All America is nothing but impudent inflated rampantly guideless burgers—trades people,” nowhere is that more true than in the desiccated art of our poetry. This is, after all, a culture that has allowed, […]
Lorna Dee Cervantes Wings Press ($16) by Sharon Olinka Cynics beware: this book will stir sensual memories, and make even the most jaded reader smile. In a world full of hackneyed love poems, Lorna Dee Cervantes manages to be witty, lyrical, and wise without a trace of self pity or sentimentality. Her voice is direct […]
Forrest Gander photographs by Raymond Meeks, Graciela Iturbide, and Lucas Foglia New Directions ($15.95) by Justin Wadland Climatologists drill core samples from rock, soil, and ice, seeking evidence of the most fleeting of natural phenomena: ancient weather. Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that each of the four sections in Forrest Gander’s Core Samples from the […]
Adele Ne Jame Manoa Books and El León Literary Arts ($15) by Zara Raab Poets weave textures with words that reach back in threads of association through our shared histories. The Lebanese American poet Adele Ne Jame, who has lived for four decades in Hawaii, creates a rich cloth of colors and scents, visions and […]
Sarah Gorham Four Way Books ($15.95) by Nick DePascal Sarah Gorham's fourth collection of poetry, Bad Daughter, is a varied and dynamic meditation on the many manifestations of family life, from husbands and wives, to sisters, and especially mothers and daughters. Gorham's poems consider these relationships from a multitude of viewpoints, including prayers, deconstructed sonnets and […]
Cedar Sigo City Lights Publishers ($13.95) by Bethany Prosseda John Wieners, in “A Poem for Record Players,” states, “The scene changes”; it is more than just a matter of coincidence that this line should so aptly describe Cedar Sigo’s collection Stranger in Town. Sigo, whose work is in conversation with poets such as Wieners, Jack Spicer, […]