'3.3 billion years ago we caught a break . . .' So states the first line of Christopher Buckley's new poetry collection Chaos Theory, setting the tone of casual erudition, an atomic fusion of the personal and the cosmic. The book's theme is a perennial one: Chaos Theory is really about finding the underlying order in apparently random data. True to his word, Buckley gives us "Shimmy Shimmy Ko-Ko Bop" by Little Anthony & The Imperials: - '… particles; the cathedral of the atom, and Gunsmoke, The Whistler, Mr. & Mrs. North- / zooming past / the cosmic street lamps,' bids us make the connections along with him. It's a startling, deliriously pleasurable enterprise, poem by poem. As we reach the end of our cosmic journey through Chaos Theory, we feel like one of the imagined aliens huddled at last around Voyager's Golden Records on some distant planet, understanding dawning in her eye or ear, as an x-ray of a human hand and snowflakes over Sequoia appear on a hologram, followed by a recording of the greeting "May all be well" in Ancient Sumerian and the brainwaves of Ann Druyan considering human violence and poverty and falling in love.
Under the Music is cause for celebration, as it gathers over forty years of Maxine Chernoff's brilliant exploration of a single form: the prose poem. Her pieces abound in witty dialogue, absurdist jokes, sage advice, and a gallery of eccentric characters like "The Man Struck Twenty Times by Lightning," or "The Woman Who Straddled the Globe."
Every age demands its own mythos. Thilleman creates a thoroughly contemporary mythology of consciousness which names the unnameables so that they might carry us from "Descent" all the way through chaos upon chaos, morass and vision to "what is to be known now."Like William Blake, Thilleman creates a language not grammatical or ordinary, not a language merely of thinking, but a primal language rooted in the poetic of his own body, and thus this universal body we all share with this earth.
Driven is a travelogue in which the narrator reviews his life in the course of twenty four hours. A professor at a small college hopes for something different to happen on the last day of the academic year. And it does. When he leaves his home on Cape Cod for Boston where he teaches, he enters a world both real and imaginary. Two of his passengers are his dead parents. The third is the love of his life from years ago. He navigates issues of loss, class, fame and family as he passes familiar landmarks, stops at the same coffee shops, recalls the dance at the dump, the stories of barflies and entrepreneurs, eccentric colleagues and his newfound sobriety. Is it fiction or nonfiction? That depends on whether or not you believe in ghosts.
American culture is strange-and appears even stranger after a hiatus. Cue Everett, back in Chicagoland after living in China. His father has just died, and re-entry to his former life is increasingly complicated. On top of that, while he was abroad everyone Everett cared about dove off the deep end. Exhibit A: Everett's mom, recently widowed, with a newfound faith in healing crystals and a ponytailed guru. Exhibit B: former roommate Dino's newly ascetic lifestyle. Increasingly drifting and desperate, Everett signs on to an unconventional venture: the high-stakes world of mushroom smuggling.Do the ends justify the means? What, even, are the ends? Eastbound into the Cosmos is the story of Everett's attempt to process the longing, the grief, the weirdness. Along the way he discovers the weird in himself, which may just be what ultimately frees him.
Tim Suermondt's fifth full-length book of verse, Josephine Baker Swimming Pool, is one you should keep by your bedside to dive into just before turning off your light-for its companionable tone, for its clarity and surprising imagery, for the sweet quietude of these many meditations.
Michael Anania's Nightsongs & Clamors is filled with the music of night and the cacophony of days. It is as if the poet's mind is a river punctuated by moments in time, and those moments gathered together pulsate in every poem.
Sally Connolly has a sharp ear for how poetry sounds, for where it originates and where it ends up, and she's in a good position to say, not just thanks to her knowledge of things Irish and Irish English and British English and American, but thanks to her knowledge about the guts of poems: past and present, early-career and deeply canonical, out-there and close to the heart, outspoken and close to the vest, get attention in Connolly's personal, thoughtful, pellucid language. The Anglophone world needs more poetry critics so careful, so thoughtful, so able to speak their minds.-Stephanie Burt
"This is a book of amazing range. Dennis Maloney is equally at home with ancient Japanese forms and the memory of hearing Janis Joplin at the Fillmore. Moving with confidence among continents and centuries, the poems have an uncanny immediacy that makes us feel as if the voice is always right here, right now. As one of our most accomplished translators, Maloney seems to have mastered the art of being invisible, so that his poems sing their human songs untethered from any particular autobiography, though they dip in and out of many. In this sense the book has multiple voices, all of which speak with the gravitas of age and experiencewhile somehow preserving an arresting freshness of vision. Easy of access, playful, profound, surprising, and often quietly heartbreaking, The Things I Notice Now is the work of a poet writing at the height of his powers."-Chase Twichell
John Donne wrote, "Death be not proud, though some have called you mighty and dreadful; thou are not so." In LET US NOW SPEAK OF EXTINCTION, death is mighty and proud, but while it is frequently a source of bemusement, it is also one of extraordinary amusement in the hands of an accomplished fabulist and allegorist the likes of Michael C. Keith. Indeed, this unconventional collection of short fiction might just as easily be titled LET US NOW SPEAK OF THE HUMAN CONDITION IN ALL OF ITS DIVERGENT MANIFESTATIONS, because that is its essential subject. Keith's new work probes the full range of emotions and behavior and redefines the term dark humor in the process.
Be warned! The far-ranging notes and essays of Sweet Marjoram are addictive. Once I began reading, I couldn't stop. I wanted more of Henry's wit and wisdom, his dazzling, surprising juxtapositions. I wanted to see him keep making the familiar new, and the strange familiar. Whether he's writing about folly or time or food or meat or envy or appetite, Henry has a gift for making his reader see the world afresh. A delightful and highly original collection.-Margot Livesey
Peter Johnson has long been acclaimed by such poets as Russell Edson and Charles Simic as one of the masters of the prose poem. In his new book, Old Man Howling at the Moon, he continues his exploration of the genre, exhibiting his usual comic touch. Johnson calls these new poems "complaints" and traces his influences back to fourteenth-century France, while pointing out in the preface that his wise-fool Grumpy Old Everyman is also very much a part of a tradition, including writers as diverse as Allen Ginsberg, Catullus, and Nicanor Parra. Old Man Howling at the Moon is a welcome arrival at a time when anger and satire are desperately needed to enliven a contemporary poetry scene where often fashionable irony reigns supreme.
Delightfully playful, Alexander Dickow's newest collection of poetry- Appetites-is a feast for all. Readers ravenous for Dickow's former strengths of attention to the sounds, puns and turns of language (the "crabbed utterings [that] / Topple our blurred lips out") will find themselves satiated. But the cherry on the top is a witty spice spooned heftily into the mix: Dickow's humorous tug of war between the archaic, arcane and the ultramodern (recalling explorations by Lisa Jarnot). This is "tall verbiage", as he writes in "Beverage", which readers are certain to drink in with relish. A¿ table! -Jennifer K. Dick
The Body of the World is a full-body missive, a reckoning.... In this volume, Easter addresses her burgeoning body, as well as the world's body.... She addresses slights and offenses--she dances, leaving no proverbial stone unturned. In her trek, she outlines her personal and familial lineage, giving readers a better understanding of how she has evolved and gained tools to battle racial wrongs with fiery grace. With her particular stance and strut, Easter marks this weighted terrain. We follow. We bear witness, as she uplifts and reckons.... As Easter stretches and widens her reach, she expands the margins--she bids us, in these upending times--to do the same.- Glenis Redmond, author of What My Hand Say
As a series, the poems in Echolocation swing back and forth from the natural world keenly observed-rain, birds, sunflowers, even a clam- to the contortions of the human heart, mostly caused by hurt and loss. And isn't that where the best poetry resides, between the thing and the emotion, the swan and the grief?-BILLY COLLINS
Heresway is a collection of terse poems that riff on certain balances, or rhymes-"here" and "sway" being one among a host of others-composed in the Catskill Mountains, which constitutes their affiliate topography. This book is Sam Truitt's homage to the sun, breath, psyche, etc., and most of all rhyme itself in its broadest sense, and seeks through such enactment to expose in as clear and simple terms as possible our raw human condition- and that nothing is not as it seems. Heresway is the tenth installment of Vertical Elegies, a long-term project the overarching structure and intent of which remains to be seen, though one determination, according to Truitt, is that the "vertical" is down-and from here you can advance a way there now.
For a growing contingent of devotees in the English-speaking world, the brilliant Mexican and Italian literary critic Mario Murgia is a beacon. He reads the great canonical poets, from Dante and Chaucer to Elizabeth Bishop, Borges, and Geoffrey Hill, with freshness and startling insight, joining "distant reading" to the existential phenomenon of cultural distance. A Milton scholar (among many other things), he meditates on the relevance of that austere poet in four languages to a world in which translation has become central. There are new presences as well in this book, poets beyond the canon or on its periphery. -Gordon Teskey,
J.T. Barbarese's poems are a dose of smelling salts in a sleepy, go- along world. The freshness of his language matches perfectly- abets, I should say-the freshness and candor of his world view. Tart and sere, and also witty and generous, True Does Nothing is one of the best books I've read in a long time. I particularly admire his long-lined, long-limbed odes. They are, like all the poems here, exuberantly musical and bracingly less deceived. A brilliant, memorable collection!
Tender, turbulent, witty, elegiac, Quarry Cross is a refreshment to the spirit. Robin Behn shakes out the language to fathom what she calls "the old harms" and "the needy needs"-those very forces that may shatter any of us. She writes of the beauty and potential festering of desire. However serious her subject matter, the marvelous vitality of her voice summons us to the prospect of pleasure. These are bold, mutinous, world-and-word-enchanted poems. -Lee Upton
"I am not the revolution...I am the instrument of another hand." So does Francisco "Pancho" Villa begin the tale of his rise from thief to warlord to the revolutionary leader of northern Mexico. By turns a confession and an act of seduction, The Beginning of His Excellent and Eventful Career chronicles a country remaking itself through blood and violence, giving shape to the boy who would dare to step from anonymity into power through the inexorable force of his will.An exile at 16 after the murder of his family's landowner, Villa begins a journey through dusty desert villages and barren mountaintop camps where his principles are formed and tested by endemic injustice. Building a group of outlaws around him, Villa begins to wage a war on the landowning dons that control the state, but as the savagery increases and the betrayals multiply, the ascension within Villa's command of the mysterious and sadistic Rodolfo Fierro puts Villa's ideals, and his vision of the future of Mexico, to the test.Luminous, disturbing and powerful, The Beginning of His Excellent and Eventful Career weaves history and drama into a driving tale of ambition and brutality, insisting that those who would remake the world must first set fire to the old.
Paul Hoover's The Book of Unnamed Things is a lush exercise in antiphonal parallelisms, a call-and-response of flesh, speech, and world. The accumulation of debts and releases is mapped elegantly onto the reversible cloth of the spoken and unspoken, the written versus the unwritten (and in between, the handwritten, that prodigal alibi). The dialogue here is not so much with ghosts as with the idea of ghosts, the shadows cast in the mind by sensual and philosophical inquiry. "Words unspoken / remain forever old," Hoover asserts. The quiet power of this collection inheres in the accrual of experience, ever-exfoliating and opening continuously into a plain of juxtaposed signification: "the doors are wide open / all is context now."-G.C. Waldrep
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