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Robert J. Baumann
- Baseball, George Bowering, Coach House Books, 2003
(Second Edition). Bowering’s poem of 1967 reissued in
a classy pennant-shaped chap with a pennant-shaped
cover (cover is also fuzzy like a fine old-timey
pennant). Why do so many poets write about baseball?
Bowering captures the experience of the baseball
fanatic, always involved somehow with the game, one
step from wishing he were playing, yet seemingly
content with his position as a spectator.
- Who Opens, Jesse Seldess, Kenning Editions, 2006
Anyone who's heard Jesse Seldess read is aware of how trance-inducing his poetry is. I was delighted to be able to sit down with a final copy of this collection and delve into the meaning of the rolling, yet sparse verse. Like the live readings, the work is at the same time mechanical and undeniably human, born of a deep, silent, personal experience, and always aware of the mechanism that cages all exerience: language. In losing his capacity for all but less than 100 different words, Seldess has opened new insight into living and dying, and the sounds that accompany them.
- Quarantine, Brian Henry, Ahsahta Press, 2006
Dark. Very dark. The sort of morbid occupations that all humans have, to some degree, but to which few admit. Simulataneously, these are strikingly personal and detailed narrative poems. I read it in one sitting.
- Ghosts by Albert Ayler, Merry Fortune, 2004
You know the sort of confessional crap you write on the stall walls in bathrooms at bars, or on LiveJournal? This isn't that. This is the sort of stuff that makes you love the sort of pop music you're not sure why they call "pop" music. It is accessible, but you won't be sure why. Funny and common in ways you never thought could be so.
Carolyn Elmer
- Eccentric Islands, Bill Holm, Milkweed Editions $14.95
- Anything by Joseph Bruchac
- Ten Poems by Issa, English Versions by Robert Bly, Floating Island
Publications $6.00
- Cochise: Chiricahua Apache Chief, Edwin R. Sweeney, University of
Oklahoma $24.95
- Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth, Naguib Mahfouz, Anchor Books $12.00
Stacy Szymaszek
- The Brother In Elysium: Ideas of Friendship and
Society in the United States,
William Bronk, Elizabeth Press, 1980
This is one of the most pleasing books I’ve ever
beheld, from its soft brown paper wraps, perfectly
bound around essays divided into three headings
"Silence and Henry Thoreau", "Walt Whitman’s Marine
Democracy", and "Herman Melville, or the Ambiguities."
- One Hundred Scottish Places, Thomas A. Clark, October,
1999
With his unerring sense of the weight of words, Clark
presents one place per page. Some of my favorites
include: "rock of the lurcher", "the little loch of
the trout", "cold place", and "the scar of sleep".
- The Midnight, Susan Howe, New Directions, 2003
Reading this, I remembered how much I like and have
been influenced by Susan Howe’s work. She has the
ability to make the reader care deeply about her
obsessions—bed hangings, for instance.
- Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by
Women in North America & the UK, Maggie O’Sullivan,
Ed., Reality Street Editions, 1996
I’m a hard sell on anthologies but Lisa Samuels is
using it in her class so it must be noteworthy. I like
that O’Sullivan includes work by visual poets, Paula
Claire for one, as well as by hard to find Brits
Denise Riley and Wendy Mulford.
- The Poet At It’s Desk, Brita Bergland, Awede, 1987
Awede is Bergland’s own press stationed in Vermont.
Keith Waldrop, Claude Royet-Journoud and Hannah Weiner
all have handsome letterpressed books by Awede. The
language of her poetry is both precise/elegant and
quirky: as in, "Mystery hole / Foot rest on a little
stool / At her spotted knee / a phoebe to spy the
horse’s ninny".
Peter Whalen
- I...Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, Rigoberta Menchú, Verso Books
- Hombres de Maiz (Men of Maize: A Critical Edition), Miguel Angel Asturias, U of Pittsburgh Press
- Thunderweavers (Tejedoras de rayos), Juan Felipe Herrera, U of Arizona Press
- The Cream City Review, Volume 27.1, American Landscape: Close-Up, UWM
- Baseball: The Figures, Tom Clark, Serendipity Books
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