February 2008
 

February 2008
 

Marisa Siegel recommends
Apostrophe by Elizabeth Robinson

In the opening poem of the haunting apostrophe, Robinson writes, "This is the ticket/to the undercurrent." And indeed, this is a book that sweeps its reader immediately under its spell, not with loud bravado but with quiet intensity and a strong sense of what's not there, what's just underneath, what once was but is no longer. The poems are deceptively simple, in most cases surrounded by plenty of silent white space, which allows them to breath their sadness right on the page. Robinson creates a world of memory and loss, allowing her words to cut right to the heart of her subject matter. I was left upon finishing the book feeling as if I'd spend the past few hours walking down the road of my own memories, a feeling tinged with sadness but ultimately comforting and completely worthwhile.

February 2008

Lindsay Keller recommends
The Sorrow and the Fast of it by Nathalie Stephens

The Sorrow and the Fast of It is a thick and poignant prose conversation between Stephens' multiple identity characters--the dominant Nathalie and her equivalent, yet often violently subversive, Nathanael. Complex and sophisticated in its analogies, Sorrow creates a chaotic and beautiful dual-minded pull of madness. With an often internal argument between the need for industrial terrain (Nathalie) and ocean/sea (Nathanael), Stephens successfully paints a conflicted and tense battle between these two "personalities," with no resolve by the end. Stephens is an essential contemporary writer and Sorrow should become a necessity in college literature courses as an example of experimental prose. Stephens tells us more of the mind and mind-body relation than any specialized philosopher of the like.

October 2007

Lindsay Keller recommends
Paradise, or the Part that Dies by Dana Killmeyer

Dana Killmeyer's Paradise: Or the Part that Dies is a beautiful adventure into the heart of a lost and broken woman. The narrator and main character travels down the east coast to rural Miami where she hopes to resolve her conflicted, unhappy, and newly divorced self among the "felt" avocado groves of an organic vegetable farm. In Paradise we see her first three days on the farm and meet the motley crew of workers and vegetarians that help her on her journey to find peace of mind and heart. We meet a mushroom farmer, the secretive orchard owner, and a man obsessed with his guava tree. By the end of Paradise we do not know if she will make her life among the organic vegetation or return home, but we see her transitioning into harmony. Either way we are caught in Killmeyer's stunningly descriptive language and follow her down the path to satisfaction.

October 2007

Heather Gordon recommends
Day Ocean State of Night's STars by Leslie Scalapino

"they’ve destroyed language, so we have to destroy it in it not/ movement"

(from 'Can’t is Night').

To destroy destruction with destruction—indeed, she does (move/destroy). And she moves with some levity—yes, visually, that is to say apparently, but also "semantically"/actually—between the in/out, give/take, illuminating language with language, at times, while at others leaving it blank, so naked—structural—that it’s hard to tell whether it is with duty, defiance, compassion, compulsion, or simply grace that she steps back in—into language, into the social, the violent (active), into light. At any rate, there is some force (destruction? stagnation? and/or "them") that she seems to writing against. And by placing the artifacts of "outside" (arguably the social, political, natural, even personal) on the inside (the mental, conceptual), there is some new movement possible, some tango, between what can be articulated and what can be conceived. Shall we dance?

July 2007

Alli Warren recommends
Attempts at a Life by Danielle Dutton

Danielle Dutton’s Attempts at a Life is, as they say, a HANDSOME little book just out from Tarpaulin Sky Press. My first impulse is to tell you that "it had me at hello" but I’d rather save face and say instead that it grabbed me from the get-go. Here is the opening sentence:

It started out I was hungry and smaller than most.

So intriguing! What’s the "It" standing in for? So unusual! Why not "hungrier" to match "smaller"? The back of the book describes itself as "somewhere between fiction and poetry, biography and theory," which is a lot to live up to, and Dutton does, effortlessly. For a mere fourteen USD, not only will you own this handheld guide to cheeky and cloudy-headed heroines, but you will gaze upon a beautiful Christian Peet collage, an unusually clear epigraph from Gertrude Stein, and chapters titles like "EVERYBODY’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY, OR NINE ATTEMPTS AT A LIFE." This book is barrel-chested atop a rolling green hill, a little marvel beaming in the warehouse.

February 2007

Eliza Schrader recommends
Calyx

This readable issue of art and literature by women challenges, comforts, and educates its reader. Themes like war protest, family, body dissatisfaction, and growing up pervade this collection of art, essays, poetry, and fiction. In "Alice at AA,” Maureen A. Sherbondy tells the story of one woman’s struggles with alcohol, extreme weight fluctuations, abusive relationships with men "claiming to be kings and princes,” and AA all within one very short poem. In "Eating Cake” Annie Weatherwax’s melodic prose tells the tale of a family’s struggle to cope with the death of a gay son in a conservative small town in Virginia. The story is told from the perspective of a 19 year-old daughter and sister who is fierce and defiant in the face of bigotry. If you are interested in reading contemporary and compelling work by women, this issue of Calyx is not to be missed.

February 2007

Eliza Schrader recommends
Like Son by Felicia Luna Lemus

This exceedingly readable novel is a real rule breaker. Leave your expectations at the door and you will find a rich and magical story that constantly leaves you guessing. The principal character, Frank, is a launching pad for some extremely intriguing characters whose real-life personas verge on the absurd. There is Frank’s mother, who is hypocritical, financially successful, and terrifyingly cruel to Frank; Frank’s father, a loving and dramatic blind man; and Nathalie, Frank’s beautiful and theatrical lover who reenacts Frank’s family history in the most mystifying ways. Luna Lemus does not give the reader the satisfaction of following a tell-all format for portraying Frank’s "transition” from female to male nor is the word transgender ever used. Instead, the author charts Frank’s life from his childhood as a girl to his adulthood as a man without dwelling on the nuts and bolts of his transition. Luna Lemus’ ability to deviate from a tell-all trans story lends much complexity to Frank and flips any preconceived idea about gender on its head.

February 2007

Heather Jovanelli recommends
The Filaments by Daniel Bouchard

Daniel Bouchard’s new book of poetry "The Filaments” places Isis in Pawtucket, compares administrations to animal gods, and sets in flight pigeons with red-tail hawks and sparrows. Bouchard’s third book adds to the foundation created from Some Mountains Removed (2004) and Diminuative Revolutions. In reading his narratives I saw glimpses of New England still-life and landscape, checking justice and virtue along the way. Odd backdrops emerge, as Lucretius, Dante, and Duncan discuss matters at a recycling center. I asked myself what functions does a poet have in war, in the home, or in the alehouse? Bouchard writes triptychs to create a comic book of poetic debris in brief scores that were melodic to my ear. He highlights the stars, "sunlight strips on yellow brick found on the "power plant smokestack” despite a "doom that pervades everything.”

February 2007

Neil Alger recommends
Vera and Linus by Jesse Ball & Thordis Bjornsdottir

In this fascinating collaboration between Jesse Ball and Thordis Björnsdottir, the land is alive, and it is up to no good. Written serially (or so it would seem), the title characters of this charming novel proceed to enact both violent and loving (and lovingly violent) scenarios on themselves and those (people and things) around them. Reminiscent of David Ohle’s classic Motorman mixed in the blender with Roald Dahl’s The Twits and served with a (poison) chocolate chip cookie. Don’t miss the center section, "A METHOD FOR WAYLAYERS AND OTHER LIKE SORTS DEVISED BY L. FOR PRACTICAL USE”. Information contained herein will serve you well on those long trips through the forest. In short, one of the best things I’ve read in a really long time.

December 2006

Sanaz Yamin reccomends
The Basketball Article by Bernadette Meyer and Anne Waldman

Don’t expect scores and standings, or trades and tip-offs in The Basketball Article. It is instead a "purely prophetic work in the tradition of social realism” where the court can pit men against women, the Spurs against the Celtics, or poets against poets even, in a language challenge with forwards and fouls. Expect to be in the audience, while not rooting for a particular team, in conversation with players and publicity managers, while sipping a tequila sunrise, and bringing a book of Shakespeare’s sonnets to the opposing team’s bench. A book for both those who watch basketball as a national sport, and those who watch only because they think the team looks good in their uniforms.

December 2006

Phoebe Wayne recommends
The Men: A Lyric Book by Lisa Robertson

Lisa Robertson channels the men, insults the men, conjugates the men, laments the men, enjambs the men, adores the men, and above all, investigates men in this lyric book. The voices of lyric poetry’s men loom in the text, as do the problems of gender and identity in the works that these writers leave us. Robertson makes use of lyric cut with sharp analysis, letting a mercurial subjectivity slide and flutter as the speaker considers men from different angles. The book is generous, angry, funny, and sad. In some of my favorite moments, the world develops as it comes both at and from the speaker, complicating subjectivity while leaving it open and hopeful:

November 2006

Jennifer Dearinger recommends
Trespasses by, Padcha Tuntha-obas

Oscillating between English and Thai, these poems constantly transform as they encounter new challenges in this cultural split. Whether or not you can read the Thai (which I can’t), Tuntha-obas layers a variety of poetic textures and narratives over one another achieving both a simultaneity and a sort of "betweenness" : "There’s belonging/much more/than what’s to be/in one place." In these poems, the place between cultures invites an examination of what shapes or creates words, customs, homes, selves, and of what good may come from each of these things. "There are all these things wanting to enter and all these beautiful things find their own ways of being uttered."

November 2006

Erik Sapin recommends
An Educated Heart by Mairead Byrne

My favorite poem from this collection:

We all die a little
When we're in the car with you.

Byrne treats her subject like we should sip coffee and chat together in a morning kitchen. I often find that while reading her work she has taken me back home. I get to help with the chores and feel effective. A great many poetic styles are incorporated in her disarmingly charmed "small muscles of time." One of my very favorite poets, I read everything Mairead Byrne writes.

October 2006

John Allen recommends
Necrophilia Variations by Supervert

Stop. I know what you're thinking: "That's disgusting." And yes, this is not a book for the squeamish. But if you're looking for a truly different read, full of thoughts you've never even let yourself think before, you owe it to yourself to check out this collection of short stories and meditations. Told with surprising virtuosity in an almost maniacal range of voices, these stories explore more manifestations of the eros for thanatos than the Psychopathica Sexualis could hope to catalogue. Instead of keeping these disturbing urges at a comfortable distance, Supervert forces the reader to contemplate the nearness and familiarity, the recognizable and sometimes universal experiences that drive his characters to explore their repugnant desires. Supervert's necrophiles are doctors and businessmen, rich kids and heavy-metal guitarists, always reluctant to seek 'healing,' and often insistent upon the naturalness of their fetish-in short, not so far from ourselves as we might like to imagine. And once you make your way through this mind-bending mélange, there's always Extraterrestial Sex Fetish, also by Supervert, to dive into next.

October 2006

Ryan Pittington recommends
Post War and Other Stories by F.S. Rosa

The first person narrator in this collection of short stories offers a detached but utterly concerned view of her life and friends; she is emotional without getting too excited, sarcastic, yet not unfeeling. The settings vary from her travels through India to a pet store or Safeway or party in San Francisco, to New York as it was in her youth. She writes with a spirit of dying revolution, of careful, apprehensive compassion, always with a meta-fictional touch that makes the text more personal rather than more theoretical, revealing an undeniable connection between Rosa and her main character Lena, a world recreated by the author and narrator together. When her friend Eric proposes that she concentrate on one idea in order to write the story in which they concurrently both exist, Lena thinks: "Even if Eric is only a device his suggestion still bothers me." Rosa's craft is carefully focused, making each piece quick, poignant, and definite. If you want to skip around, Post War, Chew Toy, and Grappa stand out in this collection (as author Kevin Killian agrees, apparently).

September 2006

Alli Warren recommends
Cheerleader's Guide to the World: Council Book
by Stacy Doris

Rah rah for Stacy Doris' "cheerleader's guide to the world: council Book". Her lyric line is sharp here and dead-on. Despite being made of hugs (x) and kisses (o), the hand-drawn football plays [invasion depictions] are war-games. I read this writing as an attempt at counteraction, by transformation [translation], as "a pond of no separations".

August 2006

Brent Cunningham recommends
Do Not Awaken Them With Hammers
by Lidija Dimkovska

Shouldn't everyone have a book in their library with some facing-page Macedonian? Whether you can read it or not (and generally not, I should guess) it's lovely to look at as you read these wonderfully foreign poems in their skilled & seductive English translation. Dimkovska is apparently a leading poet in Macedonia, but what's most pleasurable to me here is listening to the distances between American and Macedonian poetic cultures. Some poems struck me as somewhat classifiable, something like Czech-absurdist imitations of Beat prose poetry, but just as many were truly mystifying, entirely off all my known radars. "Krishna will start smelling of a 'Quatro stagione' pizza"--if that kind of strangeness leaves you pleasurably dumbfounded, there's hundreds of such moments here.

August 2006

Katie Hannon recommends
Heavenly Breakfast by Samuel Delany

Samuel Delany's memoir about New York's urban communes during the winter for '67 offers a gritty picture to counter the usual stories of peace and love during the summer of '68. Delany paints a loving portrait of the commune in which he lived, but at the same time casts a critical eye on communes in general and the idealistic programs that they often entail.

August 2006

Andrew Kenower recommends
Scout by Norma Cole

If you've ever wanted to stand in this prolific poet's childhood living room, glancing over a discursive photo album, while being read to about Baudelaire, Strontium-90, and "the warmth of neutrality", "Scout" is the multimedia text for you. Cole narrates from the pages of her artists' book (currently only available in this version) while images of San Francisco, Toronto and the book itself cascade in a double-window slide show.  Veering between the quotidian and the cosmopolitan (in image and subject) this work is rich with variance and self-complication, offering an intense portrait of the author and the breadth of her scrutinizing eye.

August 2006

Michael Nicoloff recommends
Cunt Ups by Dodie Bellamy

Lately I've been finding that a large chunk of the writing I've cut my teeth on- "the disjunctive/"innovative" work of Language writing on forward to now-has been feeling woozy, hermetic and weird (and not in the good way). I'm not talking about the accessibility v. difficulty question here ("causing productive discomfort" trumps both), but all this exploration of textual surfaces nonetheless seems too quick to cut the cord from the charged social language of the so-called real world and result in puffed-up quasi-intellectual wank-a-thons. It's a little ironic, then, that Dodie Bellamy's full-on dive into hardcore porny language in "Cunt-Ups" takes the path of that excess to a destination far more honest, intelligent, political, and socially engaged than the oh-so-serious work of many of her peers. Make no mistake: This is an incredibly dirty, funny, and irreverent book, grounded in that too-familiar subject of sex, but the work here twists itself into a heavy and heady exploration of sexual borders. Genders and genitals switch mid-sentence only to dissolve into eroticized schlock-movie violence that in turn gives way to banal revelations like "I met you at the bus station in Chicago" or "I like fresh breads." It's too rare that a book goes off the textual deep end and yet extends outward to have direct effects on the sense of one's social self; "Cunt-Ups" is exactly that kind of book.

August 2006

Laura Moriarty recommends
Incubation: A Space For Monsters by Bhanu Kapil

This intriguing text addresses gender, genre, identity, sexuality and ethnicity in ways that complicate these issues. There is a sense of memoir and something like lyric celebration and a presence also of despair. Is it a horror story or reportage? Who and what is being created and by whom? You don’t know but it is familiar and persuasive and good and strange and you want to know. You want to read more.

"in a medical setting, with black coffee
coming from the overhead faucet in
the café like fake blood in a black-and-
white film. I can say whatever I want."

August 2006

Neil Alger recommends
I Spit On Your Graves by Boris Vian

So, what we have here is a false translation by a white Frenchman, from the "English" into the French, of a text theoretically written by an African American in the 1940s about an African American character passing as white to enact revenge against the privileged class for the murder of his brother. Stirring up a fair amount of controversy when it was first published in Paris in 1946, I Spit On Your Graves gained instant notoriety when it was found in a hotel room next to a dead body in 1947. Disturbing, violent, and yet still a fascinating exploration of mid-century racial issues from a handful of unique angles. Not a text for the squeamish reader.

August 2006