Donald Hall Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ($22) by James Naiden This is Donald Hall’s sixteenth collection of poems in six decades, although he has also published books of prose—including three memoirs—and edited several anthologies. A graduate of both Harvard and Oxford, Hall’s education prepared him well for a notable career as a poet, and that he […]
VERGES & VIVISECTIONS j/j hastain Knives, Forks & Spoons Press (£14) STORAGE CASE John Martone Otoliths ($24.95) by Jay Besemer It’s a good time for visual poetry. The genre is expanding its influence through an increase in practitioners, and innovative composition methods are constantly being discovered and adapted. Publication technologies have advanced and become mainstreamed […]
Technology, Spirit, and Embodied Self in Recent Visual Poetry VERGES & VIVISECTIONS j/j hastain Knives, Forks & Spoons Press (£14) STORAGE CASE John Martone Otoliths ($24.95) by Jay Besemer It’s a good time for visual poetry. The genre is expanding its influence through an increase in practitioners, and innovative composition methods are constantly being discovered […]
Mary Biddinger Black Lawrence Press ($9) by Roxanne Halpine Ward Mary Biddinger’s chapbook transports St. Monica from her historical context as the mother of Saint Augustine and patron saint of abuse victims, alcoholics, housewives, and mothers, reimagining her life in the modern day as a 20th-century Catholic girl with an abusive marriage looming in her […]
Marina Blitshteyn Argos Books ($10) by Vladislav Davidzon Reviewing a new volume of poems by a bright young Russian-American poet, one retreads through a host of taxonomic issues. To condense the debates of an entire critical discipline into a telegramattic brief, the literary output grouped together until the sobriquet of “Russian-American poetry” is plagued by […]
DEAR FAILURES Trey Sager Ugly Duckling Presse ($8) WHERE WE EXPECT TO SEE YOU SOON Michael Ford Ugly Duckling Presse ($10) by E. Marie Bertram Trey Sager’s Dear Failures and Michael Ford’s Where We Expect to See You Soon are unlikely bedfellows. In fact, they’re not really bedfellows at all, except that both chapbooks were recently published by Ugly […]
In the past few years, around the middle of December, I’ve noticed a new wrinkle in the weather-related small talk of early winter: in the course of conversation, someone inevitably mentions how much milder it seems than in decades past. “There hasn’t been much snow,” one of us (usually a native) will say. That’ll be […]
The Great Leader Jim Harrison Grove Press ($24) Songs of Unreason Jim Harrison Copper Canyon Press ($22) by Mark Gustafson A prolific writer of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, Jim Harrison is undoubtedly best known for the last of these. The recent, almost concurrent publication of his poems, Songs of Unreason, and of his novel, The Great Leader, is […]
INTERVIEWS WITH LEE BRICCETTI, GRACE CAVALIERI, JANE CIABATTARI, AND NOREEN TOMASSI by Daniela Gioseffi “It’s a man’s world,” as the song goes, but Daniela Gioseffi has identified a few women who refuse to sing this tune. Lee Briccetti, Grace Cavalieri, Jane Ciabattari, and Noreen Tomassi have devoted tireless hours to cultivating a literary culture that extends beyond their […]
by Jim Cohn Internationally acclaimed poet Anne Waldman is well known as a force in poetry. She was one of the founders and directors of The Poetry Project at St. Marks’s Church In-the-Bowery, working there for over a decade; she also co-founded with Allen Ginsberg the celebrated Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa […]