Spencer Selby Sink ($15) by W. B. Keckler Verbo-visual poetry, or whatever designation you choose to use for those works which integrate or conflate text and images, is often given short shrift in American literary criticism. Critics such as Bob Grumman, Johanna Drucker and Richard Kostelanetz have tried their best to rectify this situation, but […]
K. Silem Mohammad Tougher Disguises Press ($12) by Aaron Kunin How to create a community through poetry: (1) A poem can describe an existing social organization such as "adolescent girls in America." (2) It can describe a society from an earlier historical period: "I spent 20 years in the army / of the most powerful […]
Pentti Saarikoski Translated by Anselm Hollo La Alameda Press ($18) by Gregory Farnum Look for information on Pentti Saarikoski at your local library or (in English) on the net, and you'll find precious little. Yet he is a major Finnish poet, and Trilogy, completed shortly before his death in 1983, is his crowning work. Fortunately […]
Lorenzo Thomas Blue Wind Press ($19.95) by Christopher Luna In his introduction to this expanded second edition of his first major poetry collection (originally published in 1979), Lorenzo Thomas provides an extremely pragmatic statement of his poetics: Always it has seemed sensible to me to accept the proposition that the poet is the man who […]
The Midnight Susan Howe New Directions ($19.95) by Michelle Mitchell-Foust I recently visited an exhibit called "Two Rooms," featuring installations by the artist Rosamond Purcell. The "rooms" were first, a "Recreation of scientist Olaus Worm's room," a cabinet of curiosities which Worm created in Amsterdam in 1655, and second, a reconstruction of Purcell's studio in […]
María Sabina: Selections Edited by Jerome Rothenberg University of California Press ($16.95) by Hank Lazer Jerome Rothenberg has done it again, having put together a compelling and important new book, María Sabina: Selections, which he correctly claims is "a devastatingly human book and testimony." Rothenberg's opening remarks in the editor's preface hint at the range […]
Jeffery Conway, Lynn Crosbie, and David Trinidad Turtle Point Press ($21.95) by Steven Moore Even less than the epic itself, the mock-epic is not a popular form for poets today; indeed, it would be hard to match, much less improve on, the great mock-epics of Alexander Pope, "The Rape of the Lock" and "The Dunciad." […]
Pier Paolo Pasolini Edited by Walter Siti Translated by Marina Harss Other Press ($24) by Tom Sanfilip It is difficult to pinpoint the cultural impact of an artist who ranges over so much creative territory in decidedly unique ways; simply approximating their universal importance becomes no small feat for the critic. In the case of […]
Barbara Guest Roof Books ($24.95) by Corinne Robins Dürer in the Window contains the poet Barbara Guest's writings on art from the '50s to the present; designed by the artist Richard Tuttle, the book (with its multiple typefaces and idiosyncratic layouts) is also a beautiful object. It opens with a marvelous essay on Jean Arp […]
Cory Doctorow Four Walls Eight Windows ($13.95) by Doug Pond Stripped of the superfluous detail typically found in science fiction, the stories in Cory Doctorow's new collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, nevertheless move through worlds that are well fleshed out. Take "0wnz0red," in which a computer programmer named Liam hacks into his […]