Experts Are Puzzled by Laura Riding / Ugly Duckling Presse / 978-1937027865 / May 1, 2018 / 144 pages Laura Riding’s Experts Are Puzzled is a difficult book to classify. At times it looks like a collection of short stories or parables, at other times it looks like a series of philosophical observations. Regardless of this ambiguity, Experts Are Puzzled is a clear and … [Read more...]
To The Many: Collected Early Works by Lola Ridge, reviewed by Billy Mills
To the Many: Collected Early Works by Lola Ridge. Daniel Tobin, ed. / Little Island Press / August 2018 Lola Ridge’s life was, in many ways, a tale of her times. Born Rose Emily Ridge in Dolphin’s Barn in Dublin, she and her mother emigrated to New Zealand as a child after the death of her father. She acquired a stepfather with a taste for Shakespeare and drink, married … [Read more...]
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes reviewed by John Yohe
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes / Penguin / 2018 / paperback / 9780143133186 I knew Terrance Hayes' new book was going to be powerful when some of the poems appeared in the American Poetry Reviewrecently. I am not disappointed. American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin is, I'm calling it, the best book of poetry of the year. It's … [Read more...]
Douglass by Day / Douglass by Night: Reading F. Douglas Brown’s ICON
ICON by F. Douglas Brown / Civil Coping Mechanisms / 2018 / 978-1948700009 Icon is an ekphrasis of the place where personal and global histories coalesce. F. Douglas Brown examines the prominent images of those who have shaped his past. Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass (the poet’s namesake) take center stage. Prominent icons are transformed into art. They become walls, … [Read more...]
Nona Caspers’ The Fifth Woman, reviewed by Noah Sanders
The Fifth Woman by Nona Caspers / Sarabande Books / 160 pages / 978-1946448170 / August 14, 2018 The death central to Nona Casper’s incredible new book, The Fifth Woman (Sarabande Books), happens within pages of the book starting. Michelle, the live-in girlfriend of the book’s unnamed narrator, is hit by a car while riding her bike to work and dies in the ambulance on the … [Read more...]
Nothing Good Can Come from This by Kristi Coulter, reviewed by Noah Sanders
Nothing Good Can Come from This by Kristi Coulter / MCD x FSG Originals / 978-0374286200 / 224 pg. / August 7, 2018 The best of addiction memoirs brings a sense of guilt with it. You read a well-penned piece about someone's struggle with alcohol and then you slink away to your question and stare shamefully at your cold glass of 4:00pm wine. You dog-ear a page and then try to … [Read more...]
Echo Bay: Poems by Jennifer Battisti, reviewed by Emily Hoover
Echo Bay: Poems by Jennifer Battisti / Tolsun Books / 9781948800013 / 2018 / paperback; 42 pp. Jennifer Battisti’s chapbook of poems, Echo Bay, has its roots in the sand and rock of Las Vegas. Battisti studied creative writing at the College of Southern Nevada, currently works with the Las Vegas Poets Organization, and has published with several area journals and … [Read more...]
Absences: A Sequence by John A. Griffin, reviewed by Wm. Anthony Connolly
Absences: A Sequence by John A. Griffin / The Esthetic Apostle / In The Presence of Absence In ancient philosophy, the soul is described as a slab of wax. When the soul is impacted by experience an impression is left, often described as the glyph of a signet ring pressed down into the supple wax. Memory, then, is the tracing of what’s left behind, the outline of what … [Read more...]
Eileen R. Tabios’ Manhattan: An Archaeology reviewed by Neil Leadbeater
Manhattan: An Archaeology by Eileen R. Tabios / Paloma Press / ISBN: 978-1-365-87509-0 / 2017 Manhattan, probably from the Lenape language word Mannahatta, meaning "island of many hills," is the most densely populated borough of New York City, its economic and administrative center, and its historical birthplace. Locally it is often referred to simply as The City. However, … [Read more...]
A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley, reviewed by Michael Welch
A Lucky Man by Graywolf Press / 978-1555978051 / hardcover / May 1, 2018 In his debut short story collection, A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley traces the arch of fractured masculinity through the lives of nine black men, ranging from the precipice of puberty to the dimming lights of youth. At first glance, Brinkley’s characters appear to stand and stumble as they try to attain … [Read more...]
Mortal Trash: Poems by Kim Addonizio, reviewed by John Yohe
Mortal Trash: Poems by Kim Addonizio / W. W. Norton / 978-0-393-35434-8 / paperback / August 1, 2017 I've reviewed Kim Addonizio before, for her short story collection The Palace of Illusions (2015). I still think of her as a poet, though she's one of those rare writers that can write both, plus non-fiction (like in her essay collection Bukowski In A Sundress (2016), but … [Read more...]
A Shimmering Blue: a review of Susana H. Case’s Drugstore Blue
Drugstore Blue by Susana H. Case / Five Oaks Press / 2017 / 9781944355340 / 71 pages Susana H. Case is an American original. In poem after poem, book after book, she brings her incisive wit and poetic flair to a variety of landscapes and situations. In Earth and Below (2013), Case explored the worlds of workers who mine the earth for copper. In 4 Rms w Vu (2014), she mined … [Read more...]
farnessity by Randee Silv, reviewed by John Greiner
farnessity by Randee Silv / dancing girl press & studio / 2018 Without a doubt we are living in disorientating times and in these disorientating times we are the receptacles of a plethora of information coming from multiple sources. With our technological advancement confusion takes its place upon the throne of human reason. In such a society, to believe in a linear … [Read more...]
Book Review – Betwixt-and-Between: Essays On the Writing Life
Betwixt-and-Between: Essays On the Writing Life by Jenny Boully / Coffee House Press / $16.95 / 140 pgs. Jenny Boully’s fifth book, Betwixt and Between: Essays On the Writing Life, does not neatly assimilate into the tradition of writers writing about writing. Historically, these books blend memoir and how-to into quick, comprehensive, and illustrious reads, most famously … [Read more...]
Book Review: Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character
Kay Redfield Jamison. Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character. (New York: Knopf, 2017) 560 pages with extensive clinical footnotes, primary source documents, and passages from Lowell’s oeuvre. In a certain way, Robert Lowell (1917-1977), widely acclaimed in his lifetime as the curator of his mania and thus its commander, seems a … [Read more...]
PRE- by Barbara Tomash reviewed by Dina Paulson-McEwen
PRE- by Barbara Tomash / Black Radish Books / paperback / 74 pages / ISBN 978-0-9979524-6-9 / 2018 PRE-, the fourth poetry collection from California-based poet Barbara Tomash, will delight (lay) lexicographers and otherwise language lovers, dissectors, obsesionados. Her interest is prefixes; how “beginning” functions as an introduction to meaning from a word’s initial … [Read more...]
12 Points: tenderling by Emily Corwin
tenderling by Emily Corwin / Stalking Horse Press / 2018 / 64pgs. Before diving into the book proper, a point to say that I very much appreciate that Emily Corwin’s debut full-length collection comes in at 64 pages. That’s not because I wanted to speed through Corwin’s gurlesque world, but because in general, contemporary poetry collections seem to be overstuffed with … [Read more...]
Homing In: Our Sudden Museum by Robert Fanning, reviewed by Z.G. Tomaszewski
Our Sudden Museum by Robert Fanning / Salmon Poetry / 2017 / 978-1-910669-67-9 / 82 pages In Our Sudden Museum, poet Robert Fanning is no stranger to tragedy. As readers of this collection, we become witness to a landscape deepened with heart-felt longings. Here, in his third book, we see that it is dedicated, in part, to the poet’s father, sister, and brother, all of whom … [Read more...]
Holy Ghost by David Brazil, reviewed by Michael Kirby
Holy Ghost by David Brazil / City Lights Books / 9780872867147 / 113 pages / May 2017 Originating with the poststructuralists (Derrida and The Gift of Death being one example), then reaching a sort of apex in Badiou’s Saint Paul, the religious turn in continental philosophy continues to garner interest. And despite valid criticism of the “movement,” there is no denying that … [Read more...]
Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart, reviewed by Ryan Kim
Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang / Lenny (Random House) / 320 pages / 0399589386 / August 1, 2017 In “My Days and Nights of Terror,” Mande, a Chinese immigrant, is made fun of by Korean classmates for her accent. The self-hatred is both ironic and hypocritical, evident in Mande’s fellow immigrants and herself. “No one had it in them to have a heart for anyone, not even … [Read more...]
Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan, reviewed by Eric D. Lehman
Richard Brautigan’s 1967 novella Trout Fishing in America is a difficult book. The opening chapter, “The Cover for Trout Fishing in America,” immediately puts the reader off balance, with a description of the actual book cover that we enter into, as if it is a magic portal. “Around five o’clock in the afternoon of my cover for Trout Fishing in America, people gather in the park … [Read more...]
Marc Olmsted reviews Dime Bag: Stories 1978–1986 by Vincent Zangrillo
Dime Bag: Stories 1978–1986 by Vincent Zangrillo / Sensitive Skin Press / paperback / 978-1545465004 There are two main differences to Vincent Zangrillo's account, Dime Bag, from the usual down-and-out- drug tale --- first, his "language," his voice, which has the natural speech of the street as well as his own intelligence nailed down to the point that we hear him talking … [Read more...]
Filthy Labors: Poems by Lauren Marie Schmidt, reviewed by Eugene A. Melino
Filthy Labors by Lauren Marie Schmidt / Curbstone Books / ISBN: 978-0810134690 / 104 pages / 2017 I was nursing another cold Peroni at a wobbly table at the Bowery Poetry Club when I first heard Lauren Marie Schmidt read “In Defense of Poetry,” the lead-off poem in her third collection, Filthy Labors. The turn on that free verse sonnet whipped me right out of my boozy … [Read more...]
Book Review – The Education of a Young Poet by David Biespiel
The Education of a Young Poet by David Biespiel / Counterpoint / 978-1619029934 / October 10, 2017 In a lot of ways, I have regarded my writing and my reading as being the product of some privilege. It’s not altogether traumatic to admit. I’ve considered myself fortunate to stroll beside prodigious architects of the written word, to pick their brains from time to time on … [Read more...]
Book Review: Great Plains Bison by Dan O’Brien
Great Plains Bison by Dan O'Brien / University of Nebraska Press / 2017 / xiii + 111pp / Despite its variety in form, length, and genre, most writing seeks to explain why. Now, more than ever, we find ourselves searching for answers, yearning to explain how America could reach such dire straits—politically, racially, environmentally. In response, many writers have offered … [Read more...]
Book Review – Enfermario by Gabriela Torres Olivares
Enfermario by Gabriela Torres Olivares, translated by Jennifer Donovan / Les Figues Press / June 2017 / 978-1-934254-65-3 / 144 pages / softcover The level of degradation to which Gabriela Torres Olivares’ characters sink may be so grotesque, daresay unspeakable, that to put a name to their collective experience undoubtedly required a new word. Thus we get the title of … [Read more...]
Shock of the New: Jennifer L. Lieberman, Power Lines, and Science and Technology Studies
When I was young, I found the idea that there were people who in the world who devoted their lives to writing about literature — about Shakespeare, say — both fascinating and mystifying. Readers had been puzzling over these plays for almost four hundred years — what could there possibly be left to say? Because I didn’t understand it, I was intrigued by it — a mechanism that … [Read more...]
“No, this was all first person”: Revisiting Jorie Graham’s Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts
Jorie Graham’s first poetry collection, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980) has a way of receding from memory despite its potency due, in part, to the great success of her second collection. Her career as we know it today began to take shape after Erosion (1983) was reviewed by Helen Vendler in the New York Times. Vendler wrote that the volume contained “a poetry of delicate … [Read more...]
Giving the Stars Their Right Names: Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith, reviewed
Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith / Graywolf Press / 96 pages / 978-1555977856 / September 5, 2017 Not all poems are written and speak out in defense of something, not many books reach up and over their own identity to inhabit others, “learning to become all the space i need” (see: “it began right here”), but Danez Smith in their second collection of poems titled Don’t Call … [Read more...]
Book Review – Universal Harvester by John Darnielle
John Darnielle is already something of a big deal. As frontman and creative driving force for alt-rock cult figures The Mountain Goats, Darnielle has been crafting beguiling pop lyrics for approaching three decades, garnering major praise for the depth and deftness of his song-writing. The Mountain Goats’ songs tackle big themes, they are linked together in tracks and cycles, … [Read more...]
Book review – Life is Unbearable: Grzegorz Wróblewski’s Zero Visibility
Zero Visibility by Grzegorz Wróblewski (trans. Piotr Gwiazda) / Phoneme Media / 136 pages / ISBN: 978-1944700126 We are constantly swamped with all sorts of products (books, music, movies, the news). Does it make our lives any better or worthwhile? We are Pac-Men and Pac-Women gobbling up everything hoping to eat enough pellets and find the special pellet (lover, song, … [Read more...]
Book Review: 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster
4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster / Henry Holt and Co. / 2017 / 880 pages / ISBN: 978-1627794466 It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Paul Auster – a writer known for brevity and concision, at least most of the time – re-emerges with his first novel in seven years and presents us with this; a doorstop wedge of a tome which intimidates with its physicality before the reader has even … [Read more...]
Heroin Haikus by William Wantling, reviewed
Heroin Haikus by William Wantling / Tangerine Press / 2016 / 20 pages / 978-1-910691-18-2 William Wantling's Heroin Haikus, out of print for fifty years, was recently published in a new edition by London's Tangerine Press. The book's last page features a biographical sketch of the poet. From 1958 to 1963, Wantling was incarcerated at San Quentin, the consequence of a … [Read more...]
Book Review – In Whatever Light Left to Us by Jessica Jacobs
In Whatever Light Left To Us by Jessica Jacobs / Sibling Rivalry Press / ISBN: 978-1-943977-19-2 / 44 pages / 2016 Jessica Jacob’s In Whatever Light Left to Us, is a chapbook infused with the sensual world. Bring your fingers to your lips after turning the page. This is poetry you can taste, and touch: poetry as incandescence of the ordinary world, a transformation of … [Read more...]
Book review: Kara Vernor’s Because I Wanted to Write You a Pop Song
Because I Wanted to Write You a Pop Song by Kara Vernor / Split Lip Press / 75 pages / ISBN: 978-0-9909035-7-4 "… this is what boys did to girls" My dad used to say there were two ways to enter the sea: you walk in slowly, bracing yourself against the cold. Or you run and dive and before you know it there's seaweed in your hair and your mouth is full of salt. You're in … [Read more...]
Book Review – Generation Hex: David Noone’s novella, Saint of the City
Saint of the City by David Noone, introduced by Cathi Unsworth / Murder Slim Press / March 2017 Lunging forwards with a series of rapid-fire blows to the gut masquerading as chapters, Saint of the City, the debut novella by David Noone, pulls no punches as it hurtles by in bare-knuckle women-and-wine confessional mode before departing along its own warped trajectory, … [Read more...]
Steve Aylett is Creative People’s Drug of Choice
The following is a modified version of the first essay in Steve Aylett: A Critical Anthology (Sein und Werden, 2016), in which various authors discuss and analyze the work of Steve Aylett. The anthology is edited by Bill Ectric and D. Harlan Wilson. As more people find out what UK author Steve Aylett is all about, loyal cult following may yet explode into full-fledged … [Read more...]
Book review – Modern Once Again: Whit Griffin’s We Who Saw Everything
We Who Saw Everything by Whit Griffin / The Cutural Society / 978-0-988-71926-2 /2015 It’s said that the Roman statesman Cassiodorus was the first writer to regularly use “modern” in the historical sense of the term, which is as much to say that the relatively new Christian Era of sixth-century Rome was, literally, happening “just now” outside Cassiodorus’ window. To him, … [Read more...]
Sonosyntactics by Paul Dutton: A Book Review
Sonosyntactics by Paul Dutton / Wilfrid Laurier University Press / $18.99 / 2015 Sonosyntactics: Selected and New Poetry of Paul Dutton serves as a tidy overview of the work of an unheralded poet of the experimental and the avant-garde. Based in Toronto, Paul Dutton has had a long career working on the borderlands of sound poetry, live performance, and aural collaboration, … [Read more...]
Book Review – Swimmer in the Secret Sea by William Kotzwinkle
Known more for fantasy and children’s books, William Kotzwinkle made his name with novelizations of hit movies like E.T: The Extra Terrestrial. His forays into more serious fiction are often ignored, but his novella Swimmer in the Secret Sea deserves a closer look. It is a beautifully written but harsh examination of the ways in which we create meaning for ourselves in a … [Read more...]
