Michael Scharf
Alissa Quart | “Qualia Before Bedtime” | The Hat 6, 2005
There are 30-40 more where this came from, but there has to be a demand. “Within controlled/ violent borders, an adopted/ effacement.”
Arlet and Sam Wylie | Between Piety and Desire | The Neighborhood Story Project, 2005
Ninth ward New Orleans from the inside out.
Brandon Downing | Dark Brandon | Faux, 2005
The story of why I decided to stop killing and share the love. Dialogue as description as genre; image as character as expression. “Tired and nude, like Olson was, like a big hornet.” Or Frank on ‘roids. Aye mami—it hurts.
Christopher Nealon | The Joyous Age | Black Square, 2004
Takes post-political positionality so seriously as a political problem that you might miss its position-taking. Shucked-off refrigerator coil and Kierkegaardian reclamations of invocation are the medium, not the message. Hold it in.
Christopher Sorrentino | Trance | Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005
Channeling the other Cinque.
Jalal Toufic | Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell You | Post-Apollo, 2005
“Given that he was now ‘in’ a spatial labyrinth, when he reached a dead end and retraced his steps to the crossroads to take a different path, he did not feel that he had been at that particular crossroads; but given that he was also in a temporal labyrinth, he sometimes felt sure about his whereabouts even when arriving there seemingly for the first time, and moreover felt that he knew for certain the path to take.”
Joshua Clover | The Totality for Kids | Univ. of California, 2006
I haven’t actually seen the whole thing, but he has.
Juliana Spahr | This Connection of Everyone with Lungs | Univ. of California, 2005
The space of beloveds.
Katherine Lederer | “Brainworker” poems | The Canary 5 reading, 2005
She read a sheaf of these at the launch, and they’re incredible; the corpse of Dwight Macdonald actually levitated and flew through the air. B-Down also laid down a killer set, as did Rachel Zucker, whose most recent tour-de-force (“Like this?”) is in the issue.
Kit Robinson | Not Even | Tolling Elves, 2005
Requires nanotechnology for delivery, so delicate are the ironies. Reading at St. Mark’s was major.
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa | In the Absent Everyday | Apogee, 2005
Living familiars cross in terra-orbital venns; these are the lines.
About Michael Scharf. Back to directory.
John Sakkis
David Larsen | The Thorn | Faux Press, 2005
Ronald Johnson | Radi Os | Flood Editions, 2005
Claudia Rankine | Don't Let Me Be Lonely | Graywolf Press, 2004
Juliana Spahr | This Connection Of Everyone With Lungs | UC Press, 2005
Brandon Brown | E Podes | self published, 2005
Benjamin Hollander | Rituals Of Truce And The Other Israeli | Listening Chamber, 2004
Dose One | The Pelt (with CD) | A Purple Press , 2004
Christian Bok | Crystallography | Coach House Books, 2003 (second edition, revised)
Logan Ryan Smith | Ghosts Spiders & Dogs | self published, 2004
Robin Blaser | The Irreparable | Nomados, 2004
Norma Cole | Spinoza In Her Youth | Omnidawn, 2003
(i added a twelfth...i just remembered reading thompson's epic comic and thought maybe i could sneak it in there...if not 11 will do...)
Craig Thompson | Blankets | Top Shelf Products, 2005
More John Sakkis. Back to directory.
Noah Eli Gordon
Brent Cunningham | Bird & Forest | Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005
Thomas Sayers Ellis | The Maverick Room | Graywolf, 2005
Phillip Foss | The Ideation | Singing Horse Press, 2004
Barbara Guest | The Red Gaze | Wesleyan, 2005
Aaron Kunin | Folding Ruler Star | Fence Books, 2005
Ann Lauterbach | Hum | Penguin, 2005
Bernadette Mayer | Scarlet Tanager | New Directions, 2005
John Olson | Oxbow Kazoo | First Intensity Press, 2005
Michael Palmer | Company of Moths | New Directions, 2005
Claudia Rankine | Don't Let Me Be Lonely | Graywolf, 2004
Trey Sager | O New York | Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004
About Noah Eli Gordon. Back to directory.
Back to Third Factory.
Benjamin Friedlander
Antonello Borra | Frammenti di Tormenti | Angelo Longo Editore, 2000
In Borra’s world, consciousness is not so much unhappy as fretful, yet continually cheered by its own reflection—framed for us in ordinary language knotted beautifully by rhyme:
Veritá e metodo: la veritá
e che non ho nessun metodo. Già!
[Truth and method: the truth
is that I have no method. So!]
Ronald Bruzina | Edmund Husserl & Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology 1928-1938 | Yale UP, 2004
The story of Husserl’s last decade and his attempt—through five years of Hitler’s reign—to formulate a systematic expression of phenomenology in collaboration with a student, Eugen Fink (who sacrificed his academic career to continue), is by turns distressing, suggestive, exciting. Bruzina’s account of it is also educational, indeed encyclopedic—and slow going when most technical; I'm still making my way through to the end. Right now, what interests me above all is the transformation of a single person's work into a collaboration that reinvigorates the original impetus by calling its aims and assumptions into question. Would that such a process could occur in poetry!
Santo Cali’ | Yossiph Shyrin | Ed. Nat Scammacca and Giovanni Miraglia | Introd. and English trans. by Jack Hirschman | Arci Sicilia, 2001
Reprinting a long out-of-print edition, this presents the Sicilian poet Santo Cali’s eighty-page poem Ballad of Yossiph Shyrin (1973), which Jack Hirschman describes in his introduction as “a kind of space-age notation, semiprosodic, ellisive, with a linguistic range and buffoonery that includes Sicilian, French, German, Latin, American, and Tahitian—extensions from Pound and Sanguinetti, who are themselves satirized as establishmentarians.” Notwithstanding the silly story—and despite the overload of Laugh In-era sexual humor—I get little glimpses throughout of what Rodrigo Toscano will produce a quarter century hence. For example: “They were dry / liply talking a side-of-mouth ingroupy lingo / about the bosses,” or: “stylishly engineering the space- / root of asthma and seism the schizophrenia / of hic and nunc in the funky city / Sicily First & Last! / My Country, Tears of Thee,” or: “Shee it—xcuse me Father—what a pope what poops!”—but you get the idea. A rat-gnawed bric-a-brac polyglot language: shrewd, angry, and absolutely certain of its cultural location.
Joshua Clover | The Matrix | BFI Modern Classics, 2004
Red pills, blue pills, drugs or Jesus: everybody wants to get high, sit and watch the special effects go by. But to watch and see that the real effect is your own place in the spectacle—whoah.
Nada Gordon | Folly | unpublished ms.
With new books in the works from Katie Degentesh and Drew Gardner, among others, our understanding of Flarf is likely to undergo revision. What stands out for me at present is this poetry’s spectacular indifference to judgment. What the different writers have made of this indifference still needs to be sorted out; in Nada’s case, it would seem to be a kind of formalist equivalent to the exhibitionism of Swoon—an uninhibited display of the social body, which Nada parades before us as if it were her own.
Barbara Hahn | The Jewess Pallas Athena: This Too a Theory of Modernity | Trans. James McFarland | Princeton UP, 2005
A melancholy work of cultural studies, one in which the method—retrieved forensically from the dead—reproduces the characteristic structure of an archive: an arrangement of heterogeneous materials in which the impasse and breakthrough carry equal weight. A book, in part, about conversation, organized around the figure of “the Jewess,” refracted by the lives and projects of prominent women, among them Anna Constanza Countess of Cosel, Fromet Guggenheim, Sara Meyer (later Sophie von Grotthuß), Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Paula Winkler, Gertrud Kantorowicz, Rosa Luxemburg, Margarete Susman, Bertha Badt-Strauss, Mascha Kaléko, Hannah Arendt. The title comes from Paul Celan, who opens and closes the proceeding.
Philip Jenks | My First Painting Will Be “The Accuser” | Zephyr Press, 2005
Monsters conjured by theology, which do not so much rule the world as give it visible form: this may or may not be the subject of Jenks’s ever-splintering language; an “uneasy” book in the fullest sense of the word.
Joanne Kyger | The Distressed Look | Coyote Books, 2004
One thing writers can do in times of trial is speak for us, giving words to fragmentary thoughts that come fleetingly to mind (and go unrecorded) as we go about the business of getting by. Under the reign of Bush II I’ve found myself increasingly dependent on this service, turning in particular to works of prose. Adequate poetry has been harder to come by, with these few poems by Kyger one of the happy exceptions. Of the president: “The Psychopath pretends to care | his little prune face / screwed up / into an approximation / of concern.” Of the struggle to cope: “You are the sum / of all you ‘know’ / and the more you forget / the more ordinary / you are really nothing / special so why / all the anxious push-push / just hang // the clothes on the line / Put the black ones / in the washer / Feel the myriad little bits / of sensation / that make up emotion.” Of a gopher: “Should he be killed with a shovel? / or let nature / ‘take its course’ By morning it’s disappeared / underground.”
Angela Sorby | Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865-1917 | U of New Hampshire P, 2005
Poetry’s collapse as a shared discourse didn’t happen by accident. Pedagogy supplied the glue holding it all together and after Modernism—when difficulty became a prized quality—its application was put off until college. Sorby’s book provides a detailed account of poetry’s elementary-school heyday; to read it is to realize yet again how insistently a poem’s effects are disseminated by particular readers in particular contexts.
Juliana Spahr | This Connection of Everyone with Lungs | U of California P, 2005
A declaration of sentiments in wartime; passionate, informed, and just a little bit strange—as befits a poem synthesizing Whitman and Stein, written with the aid of Google.
Jacob Taubes | The Political Theology of Paul | translated by Dana Hollander | Stanford UP, 2004
The idea that Judaism is a primitive religion and Christianity a modern one proves as misleading historically as it is theologically, first, because Christianity remains closer to its primitive roots than Judaism, second, because the Judaism we practice today—Rabbinical Judaism—has never been ignorant of Christianity. What we have, then, are two late traditions with a common source, occasionally re-crossing paths, often with disastrous results for Jews. In these last lectures by a German-Jewish philosopher, Paul’s Letter to the Romans becomes a prooftext for this history. Taking Paul’s antinomianism as a Jewish stance, and nomos (law) as a political concept as well as a theological one, Taubes offers a hundred hints and provocations toward a new understanding of the original split, as well as of its reverberations in a select set of figures from Taubes’s own constellation of influences (Nietzsche, Freud, Schmitt, Benjamin). A rich, exuberant discourse.
About Benjamin Friedlander. Back to directory. Back to Third Factory.
David Dowker
Charles Alexander | Near Or Random Acts | Singing Horse Press, 2004
Will Alexander | Exobiology as Goddess | Manifest Press, 2004
Allen Fisher | Entanglement | The Gig, 2004 (or, equally: Gravity | Salt Publishing, 2004)
Benjamin Friedlander | Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism | The University of Alabama Press, 2004
Alan Halsey | Marginalien | Five Seasons Press, 2005
Laura Moriarty | Self-Destruction | The Post-Apollo Press, 2004
Jennifer Moxley | Often Capital | Flood Editions, 2005
J.H. Prynne | Furtherance | The Figures, 2004
Jed Rasula | Syncopations: The Stress of Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry | The University of Alabama Press, 2004
Lisa Robertson | Rousseau’s Boat | Nomados, 2004
Elizabeth Willis | Meteoric Flowers | Atticus / Finch Chapbooks, 2004
Visit the Alterran Poetry Assemblage, edited by David Dowker. Back to directory.
Jeff Hamilton
Miriam Nichols | “What To Do With Papa: Charles Olson and Ezra Pound at St.
Elizabeth’s” | National Poetry Foundation Poetries of the 1940s Conference |
Orono, ME, June 2004
An idea can clip you; so Nichols’ talk, on “the commons” as Olson’s warrant for the representation of space (which took in Jefferson/Pound, the Frankfurt school, and Hardt and Negri’s plane of immanence) gave me a sleepless night in Orono, and several since. When she finished, the elderly Olson scholar in the front row of the classroom into which we’d been corralled blurted out, “Why, that’s the damndest thing I’ve ever heard!”
Glenn Mott | Analects on a Chinese Screen | unpublished ms. (approx. 60 pp.)
Imagine Pound’s lifework on the ideogram, and the proseline in verse, taken up, transformed into a crisis poem, or mixed-format memoir, on a year in pre-Tienamen Shanghai, by Mott, a New York journalist and St. Joseph, Missouri native. Then welcome to my consideration, that this work of uncompromising formal hybridity and psychological acuity remains without a publisher. An astonishment around which more thematic concerns merely devolve. “I need an editor,” Mott has said to one who, like myself, is an editor. So I put it to myself.
Harryette Mullen | Sleeping With The Dictionary | University of California Press, 2002
Poetry, here, goes back to poems, or how the poem poems, a deeply thought-through heuristic exercise in writing writing. It makes other errands in Steinian modernism look self-flattering.
Laura Mullen | Subject | University of California Press, 2005
What would a Steinian writing practice look like if it came out of—not Charles and Ray Eames sleeping around with a dictionary—but deconstructing the lexical implications in a phonotext? Deeply impressed by the place of negativity in the voice, Laura Mullen’s difficult, serious book of play had me scratching my head at first, but rewarded upon return.
Robin Blaser | “Great Companion: Dante Alighiere 1” | Even on Sunday: Essays, Readings, and Archival Materials on the Poetry and Poetics of Robin Blaser | Ed. Miriam Nichols | Sagetrieb 17:1-3 | National Poetry Foundation, 2002
Blaser’s long collage poem, which the author read aloud to a group of 25 or 30 at Milwaukee’s Woodland Pattern Books in October 2004, reflects on, and attempts to move poetry back towards words’ home in language—its vernacular truth. “Do you read out much?” I asked Blaser at the party after. “I don’t know if so and so likes my work, so how can I ask for readings? I have to wait to be asked. I like to do it when I’m asked.”
Jorie Graham | Overlord | Ecco, 2005
Object of much rebuke this year, Graham also published a book, one that I suspect began as a meditation on occupation, Americans on Iraqui soil, German on French, even French and American on Vietnamese, for Graham seems to struggle within the lingual-spiritual paradigms of New Left politics. A pervasive mode in her poetry, the loco-descriptive crisis poem, or shoreline ode, emerges from her radicalism with a difference from her models Bishop, Stevens, or Whitman: In the sequence of poems partly carried on the collaged voices in documentary evidence of fallen American G.I.s, “Spoken From the the Hedgerows,” soldiers caught in the briarpatch of execptionalism haunt the exemplifying poetics she takes over from this dominant American lyric mode.
Giorgio Agamben | Language and Death | University of Minnesota Press, 1982
Crucial to our understanding late modernism in its interrogation and reduction of theophanic ecstasy, Giorgio Agamben work explores the environtological basis of Western (specifically American) exceptionalism, and I’ve been slowly working my way through it for several years. Homo Sacer is central to the most recent texts on the Open and Carl Schmitt’s state of exception. However, the text I most often return to, for its reading of Heidegger’s pastoralism, is Language and Death.
Peter O’Leary | Depth Theology | University of Georgia Press, forthcoming (2005)
Full of ecstatic troping that bounds across lexical registers of the high style like a 14 year old taking a staircase, O’Leary’s second book exhibits a much more theophanic ear than his first: “God visits the cranial shell in fireworks,” goes the first sentence. “He footraces the the fissures loosening the seams like epiphany,” goes the second. There has to be this high for there to be that low, and that there must be the book’s rhetorical brilliance.
Ronald Johnson | Radi os | Flood Editions, 2005
I had been reading, and then re-reading (with pleasure), The Book of the Green Man (1967), when my subscription to Flood turned up this, Johnson’s setting of the first four books of Paradise Lost—an excision of the parts that didn’t interest him?—while he maintained Milton’s field. And that started me writing…
Eric Pankey | Reliquaries | Ausable, 2005
A culmination of Pankey’s work within the mode of the lapsed sublime in which he’s already such an adept that here the innovation is to have actually created a form, the reliquary, 50 X 20 ll. in these little four five-line-stanza-ed poems, most stanzas romantically hemi-stitched in the middle, a form that seems particularly expressive of the work’s repetitive, obsessive craftsmanship. Pankey is O’Leary’s dark twin brother, cunning where O’Leary is educative, harrowingly funny where O’Leary is irreverently derivative.
Devin Johnston | Aversions | Omnidawn, 2004
Johnston is a public, an occasional poet, for sure, yet very subtly attuned to being such in the home, privately, amidst the goings-on of a highly contingent world; what he would reject in a more ambitious poet, perhaps, is that within the social logic that sketches out The Poet’s exemplary role, all the interest in the poem’s immediateoccasion drains out: “A cyclist is only such / while seated on a bike, / a sleeper while asleep.”
Jeff Hamilton on Robert Duncan and Laura Riding.
K. Silem Mohammad
Taylor Brady | Yesterday's News | Factory School, 2005
Franklin Bruno | Armed Forces | Continuum, 2005
Mary Burger | Sonny | Leon Works, 2005
Ben Friedlander | Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism | U of Alabama P, 2004
Aaron Kunin | Folding Ruler Star | Fence Books, 2005
David Larsen | The Thorn | Faux Press, 2005
Jennifer Moxley | Often Capital | Flood Editions, 2005
Ron Padgett | Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard | Coffee House, 2005
Ron Silliman | Under Albany | Salt, 2004
Juliana Spahr | This Connection of Everyone with Lungs | U of California P, 2005
Chris Stroffolino | Speculative Primitive | Tougher Disguises, 2004
Note: This was very hard. I finally had to exclude books published before 2003 and chapbooks in order to get the list down to eleven. Among the most painful texts to exclude were Alli Warren's Hounds (no imprint, 2005), Lyn Hejinian's The Fatalist (Omnidawn, 2003), and David Larsen's Syrup Hits (Kenning Editions, 2004).
K. Silem Mohammad's Lime Tree. Back to directory.
Franklin Bruno
Stan Apps | Soft Hands | Ugly Duckling, 2005
Thom Anderson | Los Angeles Plays Itself (film), 2004
Kenward Elmslie | Agenda Melt | Adventures in Poetry, 2004
Renee Gladman | The Activist | Krupaskaya, 2003
Kimberly Lyons | Saline | Instance, 2005
Carol Mirakove | Occupied | Kelsey Street, 2004
Alice Notley | Coming After: Essays on Poetry | U of Michigan, 2005
Paul Morley | Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City | U of Georgia, 2005
Ron Padgett | Joe | Coffee House, 2004
Lisa Robertson | First Spontaneous Horizontal Restaurant | Belladonna | 2005 | Also "Wooden Boats" in Jacket 27
Susan Wheeler | Ledger | U of Georgia, 2005
About Franklin Bruno. Back to directory.
Joseph Mosconi
René Daumal | Mount Analogue | The Overlook Press, 2004
My kind of quest: unfinished. Daumal maps his "desire to become" in this Gurdjieffian allegory, and howl's at the moving, holy mountain.
Jack Spicer | Jack Spicer's Detective Novel: The Tower of Babel | Talisman House, Publishers, 1994
René Char | This Smoke That Carried Us: Selected Poems | White Pine, 2004
Scoli Acosta | A Deep Puddle & Piquillo ou le Rêve de Mr. Hulule | Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers, 2005
In which an artist, fresh in France, spends three years investigating and re-enacting the life of the 19th century poet Gerard de Nerval, complete with lobster walks, Aurelian nights, & Dumasian theatrics. Inventing is fundamentally recollecting, indeed.
Catherine Daly | Locket | Tupelo, 2005
Gold! I happened upon this jewel in a bookshop and my reflection on its cover nearly blinded me. I opened it up and learned a little more about love, dream cars, lyres…
The Tiny 1 | 2005 | Gina Myers & Gabriella Torres, editors
Jacques Demi would be proud.
Michael Taussig | My Cocaine Museum | The University of Chicago Press, 2004
Lyn Hejinian | My Life in the 90s | Shark Books, 2003
I read My Life in the 1990s and now I'm reading, er, My Life in the 90s.
Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, & Steven Izenour | Learning from Las Vegas | The MIT Press, 1972
Donald Judd | Complete Writings 1959-1975 | The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, 2005
A book to read slowly and flip around in. His opinions, written long before the new masters were masters, take the piss out of myth. And the capsule reviews are smart, clear, instructive, and no longer than most blog posts!
Deborah Meadows | The 60s and 70s: from the Theory of Subjectivity in Moby Dick | Tinfish, 2003
Joseph Mosconi's Harlequin Knights. Back to directory.
David Hess
Jim Behrle | (Purple) Notebook of the Lake | Braincase, 2003
“again without you lady dark oxygen”
Alli Warren | Hounds | self-published, 2005
“You also have trees / I know I have trees”
Allen Bramhall | Simple Theory | Potes & Poets Press, 2002
“we’ll just rest awhile and create a delicacy. there is time, a portion of which we invented. this is a love poem.”
Taylor Brady | Yesterday’s News | Factory School, 2005
“You can be sure the bodies there are / plants, as are the flowers / and regalia standing in for them. / If not a human death, unrecognized”
Rodney Koeneke | Rouge State | Pavement Saw, 2003
“The Magi know their Atari— / long drives from the bar to vacation bible school / sear in the hotter mercies of the East / that leave one a-melt at landingstrips, a sherbet / too orange for summer afternoons / ready to be licked into tongues.”
The Poetry Reading: A Contemporary Compendium on Language & Performance | Ed. Stephen Vincent and Ellen Zweig | Momo’s, 1981
“Nobody knew who had hollared. I was barely conscious that it had been me. Then Ginsberg repeated much softer, ‘rite,’ then he said, ‘rong’, began to waver between the two words like a metronome who simply didn’t know. ‘Rite, rong, rite, rong, rite rong rite rong rite rong’.”
Stephanie Young | Telling the Future Off | Tougher Disguises | forthcoming
“In the Indianapolis of your heart, I passed out right away.”
Dale Smith | Notes No Answer | Habenicht, 2005
“If I don’t sin / will innocence / dry my soul?”
David Larsen | The Thorn | Faux, 2005
“Fallen, Lord, is the grafted limb. / Thy throne, and in thy throne, / The one we grafted in the fall.”
Benjamin Friedlander | Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism | The University of Alabama Press, 2004
“[Bob Perelman] is one of the most amiable men in the world, universally respected and beloved. His frank, unpretending simplicity of demeanor is especially winning.” “This is a very smart, very provocative book.” – Bob Perelman (back cover).
hassen | sky journal: from land | and from sea | self-published, 2003 and 2004
“put to death the bed of learning / put to bed the death of learning”
David Hess's Heathens in Heat. Back to directory.
Janet Holmes
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge | Nest | Kelsey Street Press, 2003
I had read this when it came out, but re-read it intensively to teach both to an MFAclass and to a beginning poetry class before Mei-mei came to read at Boise State. I don't have it in front of me, but the line I love most (well, at the moment) is in "Sunday Morning," where the daughter is interviewing the cat into a tape recorder: "The cat answers in the high-pitched voice of a young girl." Which is actually how cats sound.
James Castle | Retrospective Exhibition | Boise Art Museum, 2005
I took everyone I could to see this. Castle was an outsider artist with an amazing history (read about him here; see some of his work here), and the work took up most of the museum. It is endlessly interpretable, I think: people whose heads are books; people with sound balloons coming out of their mouths, but blank (Castle was deaf). A whole collection of artist books he made, though he could neither read nor write except for signing his name. A sense of isolation in the work, combined with remarkable reaching-out.
Miguel de Cervantes, tr. Edith Grossman | Don Quixote, Book I | Ecco, 2003
Read aloud in the car during a three-day cross country trip (most of it on the highway) to keep the driver from falling asleep. "Oh, woe is me!" If anyone jumps on Sancho's ribs in the second part, I'm after 'em.
Kathleen Jesme | Motherhouse | Pleiades, 2005
The poetry seems quiet, but the awakening portrayed is explosive. The book won the Lila Todd Wever award, judged by Thylias Moss.
Ray McDaniel | Murder: A Violet | Coffee House, 2004
A book constructed so that any piece of it can permit the whole to be reconstructed, like a stem cell. Medieval janissaries, a penitent, a walled convent all have a place in this exploded narrative, a woman's search for redemption. I've never read anything like it.
Maggie Nelson | Jane: A Murder | Soft Skull, 2005
I finished this book in one sitting; it's quite compulsive reading, a mixed-genre retelling of the life of the author's sister, who was murdered. Integrating diary entries, poetry, exposition... and I owe somebody a review of it, I believe.
Claudia Rankine | Don't Let Me Be Lonely | Graywolf, 2004
I found the poems very visceral (and considering some involve liver failure, that's probably appropriate). Since "Plot," I've been fascinated by the voice Rankine has developed to make quite intimate revelations in her poems. People who've not liked poetry I recommended in the past liked this one (but I suspect it was mainly for the pictures).
Susan Schultz | And Then Something Happened | Salt, 2004
Another book I love! I was hooked reading "No Guns, No Durian" but this Salt book adds additional poems. I think I also owe somebody previously referred to a review of this. I'm probably in trouble.
James Schuyler | Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler | Turtle Point Press, 2005
I should also probably count the Collected Poems, which I went back to often while reading this. Schuyler always has seemed to me the most humane of the NY School poets; his poems always comfort me in times of distress. The letters, however, humanize him, showing his sense of humor (often bitchy) and giving one a sense of how he lived on so little income. (He actually wrote the reviews he was supposed to.)
2003-4 authors | Ahsahta's 2003-4 list | Ahsahta, 2003-4
Books by Sandra Miller (Oriflamme), Noah Eli Gordon (The Area of Sound Called the Subtone), Lance Phillips (Cur aliquid vidi), Charles O. Hartman (Island) and Liz Waldner (Saving the Appearances). I wouldn't publish these books if I didn't love them, and it seems wrong not to include them here.
...and Books in Manuscript, shortly to be published by Ahsahta Press:
Ethan Paquin, The Violence
Brigitte Byrd, Fence Above the Sea
Karla Kelsey, Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary
Ed Allen, 67 Mixed Messages
Brian Henry, Quarantine
More Janet Holmes. Back to directory.
Robin Brox
Steve Benson | Roaring Spring | Zasterle, 1998
A book-length serial poem.
Carolyn Forche | The Country Between Us | Perennial Library/Harper & Row, 1981
Michael Slosek, editor | Drill, Issue 5/Summer 2005 | House Press, 2005
A poetry journal (FMI: mslosek@fulbrightweb.org).
May Sarton | Letters from Maine | Norton, 1984
A collection of poems.
Illona Linthwaite, editor | Ain't I a Woman: a book of women's poetry from around the world | Wings, 1987
An anthology of poetry by women, various translators.
Jennifer Moxley | Often Capital | Flood, 2005
A book of two chapbook-length poems.
Alice Notley | Disobedience | Penguin, 2001
A book-length poem.
Robert Creeley | If I were writing this | New Directions, 2003
Craig Thompson | Good-bye, Chunky Rice | Top Shelf Productions, 2004
A graphic novel.
Kevin Davies | Lateral Argument | Baretta, 2003
A chapbook-length poem.
Kathleen Norris | The Virgin of Bennington | Riverhead, 2001
A memoir of the author's young adulthood working for the Academy of American Poets in the 1960s.
About Robin Brox. Back to directory.
Dana Ward
Kerri Sonnenberg | The Mudra | Litmus, 2004
Alli Warren | Hounds | Privately Printed, 2005
Cynthia Sailers | Lake Systems | Tougher Disguises, 2004
Brandon Downing | Dark Brandon | Faux, 2005
Michael Cross | click, click | unpublished mss, 2005
Rob Halpern | Rumoured Place | Krupskaya, 2004
Tanya Brolaski | The Daily Usonian | Atticus/Finch, 2004
Barrett Watten | Progress/Under Erasure | Green Integer, 2004
Jennifer Moxley | Often Capital | Flood, 2005
David Larsen | The Thorn | Faux, 2005
Eli Drabman | The Ground Running | Atticus/Finch, 2005
About Dana Ward's magazine (and press) CyPress. Back to directory.
Tony Tost
Chris Vitiello | Irresponsibility | Unpublished manuscript, 2005
Steve McCaffery & Jed Rasula, eds. | Imagining Language: an Anthology | MIT, 1998
Roland Barthes | The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980 | Hill & Wang, 1985
Don Byrd | The Poetics of the Common Knowledge | SUNY P, 1994
Jack Kerouac | Book of Haikus | Penguin, 2003
Jed Rasula | This Compost: Ecological Imperative in American Poetry | U of Georgia, 2002
Anne Tardos | The Dik-dik’s Solitude | Granary, 2003
Hoa Nguyen | Red Juice | Effing Press, 2005
Jonathan Minton, ed. | Word For/Word 7 | http://www.wordforword.info/vol7/
Can | Newly remastered albums: Ege Bamyasi, Tago Mago, Future Days, Monster Movie, Soundtracks, Soon Over Babaluma, etc.
Clayton Eshleman | My Devotion | Black Sparrow, 2004
More Tony Tost.
Laura Carter
Joshua Corey | Fourier Series | Spineless, 2005
Mikhail N. Epstein | After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture | U of Mass Press, 1995
Melissa Kwasny, ed. | Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800—1950 | Wesleyan, 2004
Giovanni Battista Lamperti | Vocal Maxims | Taplinger Publishing Co, 1957
Part of the pedagogy of an art form I cannot seem to leave behind.
Hoa Nguyen | Red Juice | Effing Press, 2005
Jed Rasula | Syncopations: The Stress of Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry | U of Alabama P, 2004
Juliana Spahr | This Connection of Everyone With Lungs | U of California P, 2005
Alli Warren | Hounds | self-published chapboo, spring 2005
I would be incomplete without mentioning recent music: Mando Saenz (www.carnivalrecording.com), The Weather (www.pidgeonenglish.com), and my favorite recent musical project, The Clouds (www.teamrecords.org). There is also the ever-growing stack of “definitive” texts beside my desk, things to get to, but the aforementioned are those that have made a recent impact.
Hear Laura Carter's poem "Force" here. Back to directory.
Joanna Fuhrman
Richard Siken | Crush | Yale UP, 2005
I remember years ago Lit published two of Siken's poems and I was blown away. I was thrilled when the book finally came out. It's pretty different from most of the poetry I read (i.e. there's nothing surreal or fragmented about the images) but the poems still surprise and startle me.
Rae Armantrout | Up To Speed | Wesleyan, 2004
I've read and reread this book dozens of times but every time I feel like I have never read it before. The poems are so slippery.
Donald Revell | Pennyweight Windows: New and Selected Poems | Alice James, 2005
To be honest, I had never read much Revell before. But I am really into it now. The political poems from Erasure seem particularly relevant these days. But reading the entire book, I find myself most moved by how the perspective changes. The humanism of the later poems is much more compelling to me because they follow the skepticism and rage of the earlier work.
David Shapiro | A Burning Interior | Overlook, 2002
My favorite book of this Millennium.
Noelle Kocot | The Raging Fortune | Four Way, 2004
One of my poetry heroes. I also wanted to list Home Of the Cubit Idea, Noelle's fourth book and my favorite which will come out I think in 2008.
John Olson | Oxbow Kazoo | First Intensity, 2005
This book of prose poems is very different from Olson's previous two collections. More autobiographical and philosophical. (But also funny.)
Denise Duhamel | Two and Two | U of Pittsburgh, 2005
When you hear about a sixteen-page poem that collages emails from people in NYC during 9-11, it's hard to imagine it being anything but awful. But it's strangely compelling, challenging and moving. Plus there is a poem about Woody Allen which I read out loud when the complaints about the filmmaker came up at our Passover Seder.
Jerome Sala | Look Slimmer Instantly | Soft Skull, 2005
My favorite poem in it is "A History of White People." It ends, "when White People invaded everyone could see them but themselves."
Laura Moriarty | Self-Destruction | Post-Apollo, 2004
The book struck me as more overtly emotional than Moriarty's earlier poems.
Gillian Conoley | Profane Halo | Verse, 2005
Abstract lyrics that exist in a politically charged landscape. (I've also noticed it contains a poem with a reference to Lincoln, the third I've read in the last few months. There was also one by Lisa Jarnot in American Letters and Commentary, and one by Brenda Coultas in The Poetry Project Newsletter.)
Jean-Paul Pecqueur | The Case Against Happiness | in manuscript
Ok, well, J.P. is the person I trust most to comment on poetry. The manuscript is amazing, so witty and odd. Four of my favorites are on the Spork website, http://www.sporkmag.com/4_1/Pieces/Pecqueur.htm.
Comment: Making this list was more difficult than I thought it would be. I wanted to include In Ordinary Time by Sharon Mesmer, and The House that Hijack Built by Adeena Karasick and Folding Ruler Star by Aaron Kunin, and, believe it or not, Robert Bly's Selected Translations, but I am still reading them.
About Joanna Fuhrman. Back to directory.
Heather Jovanelli
Daniel Bouchard | Some Mountains Removed | Subpress, 2005
I like his starting points.
Yves Abrioux | Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer | Reaktion Books, 1985, 1992
Sculptures and prints directed by lyrical sketches. Finlay’s pieces and places sure pull a lot of things off at once.
Michael Alpert | A Night Sea Journey | Puckerbrush, 2000
A great creative companion. After reading the sole line on each page I often lean back, letting what my eye sees next be illustrated, and the outside sounds be draped by Alpert’s affect.
Jason Fulford | Crushed: Photographs by Jason Fulford | J&L Books, 2003
His photos show what decides to happen when a donkey stands at a dead end road in late February, for instance.
Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino | Sight | Edge, 1999
A colorful source proving the great things born of friendship.
Jennifer Moxley | Often Capital | Flood Editions, 2005
The white spaces between letters, lines, and margins cleanse the symbols of heavy ties, while still presenting charged words.
Elizabeth Willis | Turneresque | Burning Deck, 2003
I admire the crystal palaces for baking, living in someone else’s music, and the Pre Raphaelite strands found in her poetry
Heather Jovanelli is a writer and visual artist until recently located in Maine. She now attends the program in Creative Writing at Mills. Back to directory.
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