An Interview with Kathleen Rooney by Rachel Robbins Some people are like clockwork, and Kathleen Rooney is one of them. She arrives at the street festival with typewriter in tow, and once set up, types quietly with her curls up in twists, composing designer poetry on topics that range from cats to corndogs. The pings […]
Kristjana GunnarsCoach House Books ($25.95) by Dashiel Carrera Kristjana Gunnars’s The Scent of Light is a work unyielding in its sensuality, uniquely attuned to the slippery nature of reading in the Information Age. In five autofictive novellas, Gunnars waxes on everything from her homelands of Iceland and Canada to train track romance, weaving together images […]
Three Native American Poets Dark TrafficJoan Naviyuk KaneUniversity of Pittsburgh Press ($18) All This TimeCedar SigoWave Books ($18) Toledo Rez & Other MythsThomas ParrieThat Painted Horse Press: A Borderless Indigenous Press of the Americas ($20) by Nancy Beauregard In Joan Naviyuk Kane’s latest collection, Dark Traffic, the poet addresses the brutality of colonization and its […]
Anju MakhijaDhauli Books (₹595) by Rochelle Potkar Readers familiar with Anju Makhija’s crisp and sharply-observant poetry will find that as a playwright, she is gumptious, experimental, piercing, and clutter-breaking. In Mumbai Traps: Collected Plays, her vision is that of a director, and her characters shine against the backdrop of India’s largest city, with all its […]
The Fruit ThiefPeter HandkeFarrar, Straus and Giroux ($28) Quiet Places: Collected EssaysPeter HandkeFarrar, Straus and Giroux ($30 ) by John Toren Though he burst onto the scene half a century ago with confrontational theatrical works on the order of Offending the Audience, and slim, visceral, Hamsun-esque narratives like The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, […]
Wednesday, November 16, 5:30 pm CentralVirtual Event: Register Here Rain Taxi welcomes legendary California poet Will Alexander to celebrate the publication of his newest book, Divine Blue Light (for John Coltrane), being published as Number 63 in the famed City Lights Pocket Poets Series. Like so much of Alexander’s work, this latest volley travels a path […]
The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin Edited by Paul HerronSky Blue Press ($22) by Robert Zaller The diary is a literary genre beloved in Europe, and particularly in France, where Anaïs Nin came of age in the Paris of the 1920s and 1930s. The daughter of Cuban parents, Nin had begun a private diary in […]
Gregory CorsoEdited by Raymond Foye & George ScrivaniLithic Press ($20) by Gregory Stephenson Reflecting on the poetry of the late Gregory Corso (1930 – 2001), the phrase “internal combustion” comes to mind: compression, auto-ignition, energy. (Fittingly, his second and perhaps most famous collection of poems was titled Gasoline.) And indeed, Corso’s work arose from a […]
Brad ZellarCoffee House Press ($17.95) by Frank Randall I met Brad Zellar, fittingly, via cassette, at the dawn of the 1990s, in one of the dozens of Minneapolis duplexes that housed aspiring bands at the time. Minneapolis was a city that managed to amplify its talent far beyond expectations for a town of its size, […]
Arda CollinsThe Song Cave ($18.95) by Dobby Gibson “Poetry seems especially like nothing else so much as itself. Poetry is not like, it is the very lining of the inner life,” wrote C.D. Wright. She could have been addressing the work of Arda Collins, an aeronaut of inner weathers whose poetry sounds like no one […]