Roy Kesey Dzanc Books ($13.95) by Blake Butler The fledgling independent press Dzanc Books chose wisely in selecting Roy Kesey’s All Over to launch their label; in this debut collection there is something for everyone. Kesey is a shape-shifter, a voice-imitator, a puppet master. His storytelling weaves and takes on several forms: spare dialogue, collage, formal interview, […]
Jerry Stahl Open City Books ($14) by Anna Rockne Filled with seemingly cheap thrills that reveal unusual originality and depth, Jerry Stahl’s latest collection of short stories throws the reader into scenes of vulgar eroticism and vulnerable uncertainty. Love Without explores love, of course, but also perversion, drug addiction, and even Dick Cheney’s secret homosexual affairs. Stahl […]
Chris Abani Akashic Books ($12.95) by Joel Turnipseed Chris Abani’s Song for Night is so good that it really only deserves a three-word review: “Go Read This!” Or maybe it’s four, adding, “Now.” The story of a fifteen-year-old boy soldier named My Luck—a grimly evocative name whose echo of hope also carries with it a shout of […]
Kerry Shawn Keys Presa :S: Press ($14.95) by Robert Murray Davis Readers encountering Kerry Shawn Keys for the first time may be confused by his movement from rhapsodic lines (e.g., “The kitchen is eating lava from a shoe beneath the stove”) to somber, even at times prosaic, meditations on time, death, heresy, and other weighty […]
Heidi Lynn Staples Ahsahta Press ($17.50) by Katie Fowley Heidi Lynn Staples revels in using words in the wrong ways. She uses adjectives as nouns, small parts of speech as subjects, and she butchers and inverts common idioms and clichés. Her poetry is one of homonyms and near-homonyms. Some poems are homonymic echoes of poems […]
Dolores Dorantes translated by Jen Hofer Kenning Editions and Counterpath Press ($14.95) by Mark Tursi In his “Notes Toward a Nomadic Poetics,” Pierre Joris advocates a poetry that is “always changing, morphing, moving through languages, cultures, terrains, times without stopping.” Poetry, then, becomes a “displaced drifting” that is always in the process of becoming—a poetics […]
Kaya Oakes Pavement Saw Press ($14) by Katie Fowley In her first book of poetry, Kaya Oakes details a transient and fervent existence, stemming from wayward road trips taken with her family as a child: “We were always breaking down. The intersection ought to have been called a landing place.” Oakes approaches childhood memories from […]
Inger Christensen translated by Susanna Nied New Directions ($17.95) by Douglas Messerli It seems rather ludicrous to dredge up the name of the silent film star Clara Bow—known as the original “It Girl”—in connection with the great Danish poet Inger Christensen, but in 1969, at the time of the publication of her important collection of […]
Rod Smith University of Iowa Press ($16) by Noah Eli Gordon From his editorship of the journal Aerial to the dozens of titles released by his press Edge Books, from numerous readings organized in the D.C. area to his management of Bridge Street Books and its standing as having one of the nation’s best poetry selections, Rod […]
by Brian Whitener Davis Schneiderman's work, which takes the conventions of postmodern fiction and pushes them one step further, has established Schneiderman as a thoughtful and energetic presence in the experimental fiction scene. The year 2006 saw the release of a limited edition work entitled Multifesto: A Henri d'Mescan Reader from Spuyten Duyvil, and Chiasmus Press has […]