Charles Henry Ford, Tom Sleigh, Charles Bukowski, and more...

INTERVIEWS

Charles Henri Ford: Catalyst Among Poets
Interviewed by Asako Kitaori
Considered by many to be America's first Surrealist poet, Charles Henri Ford is also know for his amazingly prodigious output in photography, film and the art of collage as well as his editorship of the influential magazine View.

REVIEWS: FICTION

Pure Poetry
Binnie Kirshenbaum
& Making Love to the Minor Poets of Chicago
James Conrad
Binnie Kirshenbaum's thoroughly acrid rumination on middle-aged poetic despair and James Conrad's satiric detailing of the lives of an extensive cast of inconsequential Chicago versifiers. Reviewed by Peter Ritter

REVIEWS: POETRY

In the Surgical Theatre
Dana Levin
Like that creepiest of X-Files soundtracked by Nat King Cole, Levin's poems are sonic crooners relaying the hard facts and ugly deformities of our lives. Reviewed by Melanie Figg

Nothing Doing
Cid Corman
Long overdue collection of poems by the famed poet, translator, and editor. Reviewed by Darrin Daniel

The Dreamhouse
Tom Sleigh
Sleigh's poems are restless assertions of ambivalence, spoken with voices almost assured as witnesses to an other, ethereal world on the shadow side of this one. Reviewed by Jeffrey Shotts

Abracadabra
Kimberly Lyons
This enigmatic book of poems, quiet yet intense, consciously echoes the traditions of Asian poetry and mixes them with more recognizably contemporary avant-garde techniques. Reviewed by Mark Wallace

The American Pragmatist Feel in Love
Tom Devaney
Devaney's first book of poems serves as an antidote to the rarified aestheticism common in many avant-garde and academic poems. Reviewed by Joanna Furhman

A Measure of Conduct
Barry Wallenstein
Sly, wry, ironic, pitch-perfect, the poems in Barry Wallenstein's fifth book play with and tease out happy and unhappy endings. Reviewed by Stephanie Rauschenbusch

Meteorology
Alpay Ulku
These poems by Turkish born Alpay Ulku explore a deeply lonely place, a "nowhere" in modern culture beyond the fixed traditions of any one ethnicity. Reviewed by Camille-Yvette Welsch

What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
Charles Bukowski
The second book of Black Sparrow's series of posthumous volumes is a veritable tome of vintage Bukowski culled from the early 1970s up to the 1990s. Reviewed by Mark Terrill