Meredith Quartermain

Robert Walser | Jakob von Gunten | NYRB, 1999

Based on his attendance at a school for servants, this novel proceeds in Walser's usual droll, quirky irony to depict the school of modern European life.

Herman Melville | Moby Dick | Northwestern-Newberry, 1988

It was a great pleasure to read this classic from cover to cover this spring, and discover how formally eclectic it is with its essays, monologues, Shakespearian drama, rococo poetry, and suspenseful narrative.

Pierre Bourdieu | Masculine Domination | Polity, 2001

Applying his field theory to gender wars, Bourdieu offers the clearest explanation I've ever seen of masculine domination and why we can expect it to continue — charting its connections to word-pairs embedded in our psyches.

Richard Dawkins | The Ancestor's Tale | Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004

Subtitled "A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life," this book traces the family tree of living things back to our ancient bacterial forebears. As with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Dawkins includes the "tales" of ancestors (the dodo, the lungfish, the leaf cutter, eg) at each junction along the route, the junctions being the points at which the ancestral human line joins up with first of all the gorilla line and much later the sauropsid line (birds and reptiles) and finally the eubacteria line where we hear the rhizobium's tale.

Pauline Butling & Susan Rudy, eds | Writing in Our Time | Wilfrid Laurier, 2005

This is really two books in one, containing both a series of essays by Butling which re-theorize and re-frame avant garde writing, as well as a series of close readings by Susan Rudy of Lisa Robertson, Erin Mouré, Jeff Derksen, Claire Harris, Robert Kroetsch, Fred Wah and Nicole Brossard. In addition Butling and Rudy have created two very detailed chronologies, from 1957-1979, and from 1980-2003, showing the history and development of the avant garde in Canada, and documenting the emergence of key literary conferences, magazines and publishing companies.

Pauline Butling & Susan Rudy, eds | Poets talk | U of Alberta, 2005

In conversations with Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré, Dionne Brand, Marie Annharte Baker, Jeff Derksen, and Fred Wah, Butling and Rudy explore the ins and outs of writing for social change, doing an excellent job of steering their interviewees away from theorizing and into the practicalities of both writing and reading their texts. The conversations include generously quoted passages from the work of these authors, and thus open up works that some have found "difficult".

Lewis Mumford | The City in History | Harcourt Brace, 1961

Mumford begins with villages in neolithic times and traces the development of cities as social organisms right up to the 20th century, digesting and condensing a lot of intriguing detail along the way, such as the destruction of about 5000 creatures a day by the coliseum in Rome. The precursors human cities, he argues, are found in those of insects. The city is first of all a war machine.

Erich Hoyt | Earth Dwellers | Simon & Schuster, 1996

To check out Mumford's claim about human cities and insect ones, I found this text on ants — full of fascinating descriptions of their architecture, war strategies and agriculture.

Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan | Microcosmos | U of California, 1997

This book turns Darwin's competition theory on its head and shows how organisms have developed as a result of cooperation. The cells in our bodies reveal their ancestral connections to bacteria combining forces.

George Stanley | A Tall Serious Girl | Qua, 2003

A wonderful collection of Stanley's laconic observations.

Ulla Dydo | Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises | Northwestern UP, 2003

Probably the most comprehensive study to date of Stein's opus, this book (680 pages) comprises 20 years' work on manuscripts and archives. The visual clues in the manuscripts — revisions, notes, paper, lineation, erasures, doodles, names, addresses, phone numbers — enable Dydo to pinpoint the date of writing and the contemporaneous activities in Stein's life, and thus "re-embody" the texts in one long Stein "spiritual autobiography whose vocabulary is generated by the daily life." I found fascinating news here on non-representational, non-mimetic writing strategies.

More Meredith Quartermain. Back to directory.

John Latta

Alan Halsey | Marginalien: poems / sequences / prose texts / graphics 1988-2004 | Five Seasons, 2005

Ben Lerner | The Lichtenberg Figures | Copper Canyon, 2004

Caroline Knox | He Paves the Road with Iron Bars | Verse, 2004

Christopher Nealon | The Joyous Age | Black Square, 2004

Devin Johnson | Aversions | Omnidawn, 2004

Keith Waldrop | The Real Subject: Queries and Conjectures of Jacob Delafon, with Sample Poems | Omnidawn, 2004

Lisa Robertson | Rousseau's Boat | Nomados, 2004

Merrill Gilfillan | Small Weathers | Qua Books, 2004

Philip Jenks | My first painting will be The Accuser | Zephyr, 2005

Rosmarie Waldrop | Blindsight | New Directions, 2003

Stacy Szymaszek | Emptied of All Ships | Litmus, 2005

Whats missing? Jonathan Williams's Jubilant Thicket: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon, 2005). Merrill Gilfillan's Undanceable (Flood Editions, 2005). And some extraordinary manuscripts, hints of manuscripts, upcoming wonders, gleamings in the blog pits where some fine souls are doing genuinely processual work in public.

More John Latta. Back to directory.

Christopher Nealon

Lisa Robertson | Rousseau's Boat | Nomados, 2004

David Larsen | The Thorn | Faux Press, 2005

Brandon Downing | Dark Brandon | Faux Press, 2005

Taylor Brady | Yesterday's News | Factory School, 2005

Aaron Kunin | Folding Ruler Star | Fence, 2005

Stacy Szymaszek | Some Mariners | Etherdome, 2004

Sandra Miller | Oriflamme | Ahsahta, 2005

Juliana Spahr | This Connection of Everyone with Lungs | U of California, 2004

Brent Cunningham | Bird & Forest | Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005

Kenneth Rexroth | Selected Poems | New Directions, 1984

Saba Mahmood | Politics and Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject | Princeton, 2004

About Christopher Nealon. Back to directory.

Jennifer Scappettone

Note: My books are currently smushing each other in shipping boxes in several cities, so I’ll be brief on commentary & unapologetically focus on what I remember most intensely (if eccentrically) because it was experienced locally or live before leaving the Bay Area (sob!) this summer.

Steve Benson | Open Clothes | Atelos, 2005

Was enthused to read this after having witnessed him produce a dual-media palimpsest at the Poetry Center—voice being a medium in Benson’s hands, as opposed to or in collaboration with type onscreen—in which the figures and grounds of spontaneity and commentary [[or the authentic and the diegetic]] constantly reverse and dismantle each other as they revise themselves.  The book resists the categorical interrogative with its insistent and never one-hand-clapping improvisations of queries.

Stan Brakhage | Test of Time #14 | radio broadcast from Colorado
transcribed at http://www.fredcamper.com/Brakhage/TestofTime.html | 1982

Thanks to Konrad Steiner for airing this before screening Chartres Series (1994) in a presentation surrounding Larry Ochs’ The Mirror World, a work for Rovorkestra dedicated to Brakhage (2005). Lucid talk/essay on nonsense that segues from Brakhage’s own chatter through Basque folk songs through the sounds of Schwitters’ son, Stein, and Faulkner.

Erri De Luca | Opera sull’acqua e altre poesie | Einaudi, 2002

“Work on the water & other poems”: I’m interested mostly in its abashing sonic liquidity that in the more rugged zones makes Hebrew & Italian speak like a jackdaw, recalling Renaissance-era attempts at the same out of Genova.

Judith Goldman | Prince Harry Considers Visiting Auschwitz | m.s. | 2005

One of the most terrifying texts I was variously exposed to this year: lives up to the adjective apocalyptic.

Bruce Mau & the Institute Without Boundaries | Massive Change | Phaidon, 2004

The other most terrifying (this time unwittingly so) set of phrases encountered this year, vis-a-vis a show at the Vancouver art gallery. What’s wrong with utopias, in a shell.

Retort | Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War | Verso, 2005

Takes its cue from Milton’s Satan:  “And, re-assembling our afflicted powers, / Consult how we may henceforth most offend / Our enemy, our own loss how repair, / How overcome this dire calamity, / What reinforcement we may gain from hope, / If not, what resolution from despair.”

Shakespeare | The Merry Wives of Windsor | various | 1597ish

“A box, a greene-a-box: do intend vat I speake?”

Eleni Stecopoulos | excerpts from Kinesiology or Demonic Linguistics | Mirage #4/Period(ical), 2004

From a piece otherwise referred to as Geopathy, sharing the title of an essay that appeared in Ecopoetics; sometimes presented in conjunction with the related McVeigh Did Not Bring the Plague to America or Armies of Compassion. Fiercely entwined fallout of a dissertation (!?!) that makes one keen for upcoming Factory School projects.

Joseph Strick | Adaptation of Genet’s The Balcony | 1963

Starring Shelley Winters, Leonard Nimoy, Lee Grant, Peter Falk, & Ruby Dee.  Score by Stravinsky.  We loved everything about this down to the downright cheesy stock footage of riot/parades.

Calvert Watkins | How to Kill a Dragon:  Aspects of Indo-European Poetics | Oxford UP, 1995

A sort of Guns, Germs, & Steel for poets.

Wu Ming Foundation | Q, & the collective works of the Wu Ming Foundation | www.wumingfoundation.com | ongoing

Anonymous in Mandarin.  An anti-blog.  Bravi.

...& I’m at this moment awash in

Brandon Brown | E Podes | self-published chapbook | 2005
Kim Rosenfield | Tràma | Krupskaya | 2004
Tyrone Williams | c.c. | Krupskaya | 2002….

About Jennifer Scappettone (scroll down). Back to directory.

Joshua Clover

M.I.A. | Arular | Beggar’s Banquet, 2005

I got the bombs to make you blow, I got the beats to make you bang (...get
crackin get get crackin)

Anne-Marie Albiach | Figurations de l’image | Flammarion, 2004

la voix distincte,
la voix mortelle parmi les sédiments — dans
les interstices vocaux une rumeure persiste.

Retort | Afflicted Powers | Verso, 2005

Now a new breed of bomber has understood that in the society they are attacking such networks of sociability are secondary: not absent, not irrelevant, but increasingly supplanted by a ghost sociability which does not need its citizens to leave home for its key rituals and allegiances to reproduce themselves.

Steve Evans and various | Attention Span | Third Factory, 2004

Just like watching the detectives. [We’re] so cute.

Nathalie Quintane | Saint-Tropez — Une Americaine | P.O.L., 2001

— Nous verifies dans leur bouche que nous sommes à l’ouest.

Various poets | The Hat and The Poker | Edgar and Davis, Bouchard, 2005

Though I don't believe that poetry (as a category of cultural production) can be expected to perform like pop music, I’m curious as to whether my sense that it’s radically pop’s age of the single is being at all mirrored in poetry. And I think it is, I think (*pace* Silliman et al’s debate on, you know, whether you’re a right and virtuous person if you prefer the work to the poem) that it is the age of the individual poem. By age I mean, like, 200 days.

Michael Palmer | Company of Moths | New Directions, 2005

Outline of stuff left behind.

Gustaf Sobin | The Place As Preludes | Talisman, 2005

[...] nothing, that is, if
not the

germinal circulation of
letters
a-
lighting, at last, on
something altogether lighter [...]

Michèle Bernstein | Tous les chevaux du roi | Editions Allia, 1960/2004

— De quoi t’occupes-tu au juste? Je ne sais pas bien.
— De la réification, respondit Gilles.
— C’est une grave étude, ajoutai-je.
— Oui, dit-il.

Ange Mlinko | Starred Wire | Coffee House, 2005

...And now for the bar of light under the wild pines, bunny.
...And now for the slumber of driving.

Obituaries | Various | Various | 2004-2005

Is it just going to be *like this* henceforth? It’s awful.

More Joshua Clover. Back to directory.

Juliana Spahr

An arbitrary list in some sort of reverse order.

Michael Amnasan | Beyond the Safety of Dreams | Krupskaya, 2000

A book which continually weirds me out and yet I have felt compelled to reread it several times now. It is one of few books about how class intersects with poetry. The book is a combination of smart insights and yet I often find myself annoyed because it makes that classic mistake of assuming that talking about class is an excuse for whining about about how one isn't liked or appreciated by people of other classes. Almost no attention to class mobility in the US or what it means to be working class in the most prosperous nation in a time of great prosperity. Still worth reading.

Fred Moten | In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition | U of Minnesota P, 2003

I feel I could just keep saying that I loved it forever. But I think the reason I loved it is that it is so wonderfully associationally written. And so smart. And so clearly explains that avant garde practice is something that intersects with identity, especially African American identity. But mainly I just loved to read about how he reads. Which is as a fan. A sort of fan of the weird and things that don't fit easily into conventions. Somehow when reading the book I felt freed. I guess I felt freed from all those assumptions that the avant garde has nothing to say about anything, much less identity, especially black identity. Why this would feel so personally freeing I can't answer but probably has something to do with how the academy feels so killing all the time.

Ku'ualoha Ho'omanawanui | "He Lei Ho'oheno no na Kau a Kau: Language, Performance, and Form in Hawaiian Poetry" | The Contemporary Pacific, 2005

Good introduction to contemporary Hawaiian poetry.

Miwon Kwon | One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity | MIT, 2004

Kwon talks about the move in public art from art in public spaces to more community based engagements. The middle of the book discusses the controversies around Richard Serra's Tilted Arc and Richard Ahearn's sculptures at the 44th precinct. Then ends by making this distinction between community based (art that is about a community or where an artist goes into a community and works with them as an art expert to make a piece) and collectivist (where there is a provisional group with no distinction b/t artists and community members). Smart.

Chris Rohmberg | No There There: Race, Class, and Political Community in Oakland | U of California P, 2004

Looks at three key moments of community organization in Oakland: the Klan in the 20s, the General Strike of 46, and the Panthers in the 70s. And then at the end asks why so little organization now. Interesting book.

Walter Benn Michael | The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History | Princeton UP, 2004

I'm always fascinated by Michael's work, part fascination of annoyance and part fascination of his love of argument. This one begins with Susan Howe and while his argument is interesting, I'm not convinced he knows his Howe. Same thing with his reading of identity politics in general. The argument is interesting in the tight little world in which he defines identity politics. But identity politics do so much more than he assumes them to do. The book pretty much ignores that one of the reasons to preserve diverse language practices is because often different languages contain different knowledges. It is not that all are equal and all are just markers of identity. (Big refusal to deal with Whorf, who I know is out of style yet still feels constantly relevant to me.) Or there are weird sentences like "Our descendents will all have some culture--as long as we know in principle that it can't possibly be worse or better than ours, why should we care which one it is." This is of course true as long as we assume that there are no special knowledges embedded in cultures. But environmental knowledges radically vary from culture to culture. So it might actually matter which one we choose. But the book made me want to reread Acker's /Empire of the Senseless/. And I think I also felt jealous of it because it moves between avant garde poetry and science fiction so smoothly. I keep wanting to do this and not being able to pull it off.

Steven Feld | Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression | U of Pennsylvania, 1990

With a title like that... what else to say. It has a wonderful discussion of how birds show up in Kaluli lament and which birds and how they get represented. Feld is an anthropologist. He got some notoriety a few years ago when he began protesting deals that U of Texas had with a company that was mining in Papua New Guinea (the area in which he does research). Ended up leaving U of Texas. I saw him give a talk a year or so ago at UH on folk music and another on gold mining in Papua New Guinea (which convinced me to never buy gold things, not that I was planning on doing so but am now more convinced than ever).

Sonny Barger | Hell's Angel: the Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club | William Morrow, 2000

I bought quickly at bookstore on way to airport with the excuse that it is about Oakland. Unfortunately does not answer that crucial question about why the Black Panthers and Hell's Angels show up in the same neighborhoods in Oakland around the same time. I'm not sure he even mentions the Black Panthers once.

More Juliana Spahr. Back to directory.

Nada Gordon

Steve Benson | Open Clothes | Atelos, 2005

Corina Copp | Play Air | Belladonna, 2004

Brandon Downing | Dark Brandon | Faux, 2005

Joanna Fuhrman | Belladonna Moraine | Belladonna, 2004

Benjamin Friedlander | Simulcast | University of Alabama P, 2004

Rodney Koeneke | Rouge State | Pavement Saw, 2003

David Larsen | The Thorn | Faux, 2005

K. Silem Mohammad | A Thousand Devils | 2004

R.K. Narayan, version | The Ramayana | Penguin, 1998

Marianne Shaneen | Lucent Amnesis | Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2005

Gary Sullivan | Elsewhere #1 | Self-published, 2005

More Nada Gordon. Back to directory.

Jonathan Skinner

Peter Culley | Hammertown | New Star, 2003

"A field guide to fields, a boy’s book of burls."

Mark Nowak | Shut Up Shut Down | Coffee House, 2004

"The Local must engage past its past."

Bud Cheff Sr. | The Woodsman And His Hatchet: Eighty years On Back Country Survival | Stoneyvale, 1996

"I have buried myself like a bear in needles to keep warm."

Eleni Sikelianos | The California Poem | Coffee House, 2004

"Poem in which the planet takes over."

Taylor Brady | Yesterday’s News | Factory School, 2005

"Step off my slagheap, motherfucker."

Angus Fletcher | A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination | Harvard UP, 2004

"[T]he poets after Malthus are all authors working in a new world where the truth is always a song of occupations."

Lisa Robertson | Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture | Clear Cut, 2003

"Tracing a mortal palimpsest of potential surfaces in acutely compromised situations, Rubus [the blackberry] shows us how to invent."

Gary Snyder | Danger on Peaks | Shoemaker Hoard, 2004

"In a swarm of yellowjackets/ a squirrel drinks water/ feet in the cool clay, head way down."

Stacy Szymaszek | Emptied of All Ships | Litmus, 2005

"water clock futurist"

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge | Four Year Old Girl | Kelsey St., 1998

"You hold her, like pollen in the air, gold and durable, more like a dry spring that continues holding sky."

Erving Goffman | Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience | Northeastern UP, 1974

"What is it that’s going on here?"

About Jonathan Skinner. Back to directory.

Shanna Compton

Note: These are in ordered by the date I read them, between January and July 2005, and obviously except any books I read or designed for Soft Skull (though I think those are certainly remarkable.) Two outstanding novels and a comic also snuck in.

Lisa Jarnot | Black Dog Songs | Flood Editions, 2003

Lorine Niedecker | Collected Works | University of California, 2004

Maureen Thorson | Novelty Act | Ugly Duckling, 2004

Heidi Lynn Staples | Guess Can Gallop | New Issues, 2004

Haruki Murakami | The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle | Vintage, 1998

Gertrude Stein | The World Is Round | FSG, 1988 | out of print, but available used

Claudia Rankine | Don’t Let Me Be Lonely | Graywolf, 2004

William Gibson | Pattern Recognition | Berkeley Publishing Group, 2005

Gary Sullivan | Elsewhere | self-published, 2005

Hoa Nguyen | Red Juice | Effing Press, 2005

Joshua Corey | Fourier Series | Spineless Books, 2005

More Shanna Compton. Back to directory.

Patrick F. Durgin

Alli Warren | Hounds | Self-published

Jesse Seldess | In Contract | Answer Tag, 2005

Brent Cunningham | Bird & Forest | Ugly Duckling, 2005

Laura Moriarty | Self-destruction | Post-Apollo Press, 2004

David Larsen | Syrup Hits | Kenning Editions, 2004

Sawako Nakayasu | So We Have Been Given Time Or | Verse Press, 2004

Bruce Grenville | The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture | Arsenal Pulp, 2005

Ping Chong | The East-West Quartet | Theatre Communications Group, 2005

Lennard Davis | Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and other Difficult Positions | NYU P, 2003

Mark Nowak | Shut Up Shut Down | Coffee House, 2004

About Patrick Durgin. Back to directory.

Cole Swensen

Evelyn Reilly | Hiatus | Barrow Street , 2004

---smart and serious and adventurous

Sandra Miller | Oriflamme | Ahsata, 2004

---gorgeous! somehow oddly heartbreaking. spare dismantling from the word on down

Brent Cunningham | Bird & Forrest | Ugly Duckling, 2005

---I just got this, so I'm still wandering through it, but I'm loving it; it's really rangy, really flexible, goes all over, very brightly

Ronald Johnson | radi os | Flood, 2005

---So wonderful that Devin Johnston has reissued this great classic---and with his usual exquisitely tasteful production values, seriously elegant all over.

Two others not poetry...

Robert Smithson | Robert Smithson | U of California P, 2004

---expanded version of the earlier The Writings, good visuals, great interviews---the sort of book you just move into for awhile

William Stokvis | Cobra: The Last Avant-Garde Movement of the Twentieth Century | Lund Humphries, 2004

---very direct and thorough history and contextualizing of this post-WW2 that still is under-known in the US. Great reproductions of the work

About Cole Swensen. Back to directory.

Stephanie Young

Note: Partly because I'm running late, hardly any restraints or rules are being applied to the compilation of this list. It's not at all standardized: I list only one journal even though I'm reading and interested in a number of others, some of the books I just started a few days ago but a few have been visited and revisited and revisited over the last few months. My reading and categorization habits are, happily, a total mess.

Dana Ward | Standards | Sea.Lamb.Press, 2004

Back in love with this chapbook via the release of Dan Fisher's Fugue Report, just out from Sea.Lamb.Press (and in my to read pile, so I'm sneaking a twelfth book onto my (late!) list.) The great thing about new chapbooks in a series is how they invite you to pull their relatives off the shelf, fan them out on your table and admire the design. And openings like this: "Heaven,/I'm in heaven/the air is complete without force so I breathe/in a heavenly way."

Rachel Loden | The Richard Nixon Snow Globe | Wild Honey, 2005

Feeling lucky to have gotten on Rachel Loden's mailing list after reading 'Epitaph' in The Poker, issue 5, bringing us to:

Daniel Bouchard, ed. | The Poker | Issue 6 | Summer 2005

I'm reading this over and over again in the same way you eat a really good piece of fried chicken, right down to the bone, or like not being able to stop thumbing through that issue of People Magazine with the picture of Tom Cruise on a motorcycle. (In the photo, all that's visible of Katie Holmes are her arms wrapped around his middle, and the look on his face invites you to participate in admiring his derangement. He might have his fist in the air, I don't remember, I finally made myself throw that issue away. Where did he disappear to these last few weeks in the tabloids? Am I missing a magazine?) Wait, I don't mean that carrying the Poker in my bag all over town and re-reading it in waiting rooms is necessarily like touching and re-touching a cultural sore spot, but there is a lot to compulsively return to here. Jennifer Moxley's essay on the lyric is of particular interest (among many other things, she pinpoints the weird conflation of 'lyric' and 'narrative' as terms of critique for 'mainstream' poetry) and, oh, I don't need to list the table of contents. But dear filesystem panic poems from Bill Luoma!

David Larsen | The Thorn | Faux, 2005

I'll lean on 'compulsive' again here as a description of my reading experience with this book. Especially 'Wild Speech,' p. 73. A book waiting for you to read it out loud. (There's probably some full disclosure to be done here, that is, I've been spending a lot of time with The Thorn's author, but I had read much of this book, and the little handmade books many of these poems first appeared in, prior to recent time-spending.) I haven't seen another poet handling, or rubbing against, the forms of contemporary popular music like LRSN does it. And the back cover. The back cover is just *true*.

Brent Cunningham | Bird & Forest | Ugly Duckling, 2005

Another bay area writer whose writing I've been waiting and waiting to have a full, bound book of. Look out for the amazing lyric book-ends around dense, pleasing, writing-about-writing (or writing-about-talking, or writing-about-being) prose. It's all a lot like the title of the last poem of the last section, "The Cake." Plus, "interior images are details from a painting, Allegory of a Wine-up Alarm," by Brent Cunningham. Plus you get to watch him revving up to the fiction he's (if I understand correctly) currently writing.

Cedar Sigo | Selected Writings, 2nd ed. | Ugly Duckling, 2005

'Compulsive reading experience' and 'Ugly Duckling Presse' are words and phrases you'll see a lot of on this list.

Joanne Wasserman | The Escape | Futurepoem, 2003

Uneven. In the BEST WAY. Did I miss the response to this book? Where did it happen?

Jalal Toufic | Undying Love, or Love Dies | Post-Apollo, 2002

Lyn Hejinian already said it on the back cover: "No brief comment can adequately describe this book; it is impossible even to categorize it." (I will say it's somehow the perfect companion or continuation of the experience I've had with A Lover's Discourse this spring.)

Ron Silliman, ed. | In the American Tree | National Poetry Foundation | 2002

Finally getting there. Not embarrassed to admit several discovery moments, not of *names,* but their writing. A la James Sherry's paragraphs from In Case!

Rachel Levitsky | Under the Sun | Futurepoem Books | 2003

The glories of narrative, all ranging across the poems in discrete units, the story of Lady and Turtle. Sometimes you just want to exclaim "Wicked!" especially when the poem is joking about 'schmear' in dialogue. But then "[It's not funny./nor particularly/skillful in language. In fact there are no/word pictures here at all.]" I'm WITH this poem: "[I like the idea/of writing/about writing/in writing-"

Alice Notley | From the Beginning | The Owl Press, 2004

"as you can see no world is realer than the other"

More Stephanie Young. Back to directory.

Nick Piombino

Vernon Frazer | Improvisations | Beneath The Underground, 2005

"Surface denial breeds lost ampersands.
Who understands the colon's fitful wedge?
Pursuant to undreamed rhetorics the flay.
Sidestep rhythm commands. Cease and."

Ernesto Priego | The Body Aches | ExPress Doble, 2005

"One day our names
will be read at the entrance of buildings
unrecognizable shadows
of a somewhat somewhere"

Burt Kimmelman | Somehow | Marsh Hawk, 2005

"I suppose letters to the dead are common.
We need to speak, even when there's no one there.
I think of the crazy juxtapositions, the people
and things you loved. Life's a mute grieving."

Kyle Schlesinger, Thom Donovan | Mantle| Atticus, 2005

"Last-back in time
Lash-of the 'future past'
Held things rung-this ring
(Too familiar) of the present's
Seminal knell"

Thom Donovan | Tears are These Veils | images by Abby Walton | Wild Horses of Fire Press

"I mean bark, thick meaning of bark
The actual act of cutting bark
Shot and printed"

Stan Apps | Soft Hands | Ugly Duckling, 2005

"Because they want a future
Where there's room for everyone, to enjoy themselves
Among the graves. It's a rich white racism thing."

Charles Bernstein | Shadowtime | Green Integer, 2005

"You can do nothing worthwhile
until you discover your own imperatives
the commands that will make
the supreme demands on your life"

Jerome Sala | Look Slimmer Instantly! | Soft Skull, 2005

"problem is:
since we rule the world
the only culture we have
is the air we breathe
you human fuckers"

Standard Schaefer | Water and Power | Agincourt, 2005

"who blames the excessive heat on this damn thirst
the word property evaporates from the dossier
the word slavery not even noted"

Alli Warren | Hounds | Self-published | Spring 2005

"Louise is alright, but so delicious
and mechanical are my offspring
I need not worry even a poet
could name it by name"

Paul Celan | Lightduress | Trans. Pierre Joris  | Green Integer, 2005

"Webbing beween the words,
their time-halo-"

Clayton Couch | Artificial Lure | effing press, 2005

"poems cast and collapsed into one life's misgivings
does anyone live long enough to forget the whole song?"

Brother Tom Murphy | finish . your phrase. first line index. 03 | cat press, 2005

"some neil young in the morning...
versions of life's worth"

Mike Kelleher | To Be Sung | Blaze Vox, 2005

"I'll fuck anything
that moves.
But everything
is still"

Vanitas #1: The State | Ed. Vincent Katz

"Comes to an end. Disestablished path. *maybe baby*
token analytic muse in the glove compartment"— Ann Lauterbach

The PiP Anthology of World Poetry Volume 5: Intersections: Innovative Poetry of Southern California | Ed. Douglas Messerli | Green Integer, 2005

"fried brains and all, dumbfounded
in Los Angeles, where mosquitoes drowse
in noonday heat, bloodlust drained from
tropical eyes" — Wanda Coleman

Gary Sullivan | Elsewhere #1, 2005

"There are so many people, so many dreams"

The Hat #6 2005 | Ed. Jordon Davis

"Not something you have. Not something you are. Not even a
medium in which you swim. Then what" — Jonathan Mayhew

Kiosk #4, 2005 | Ed. Kyle Schlesinger, Sasha Steenson, Gordon Hatfield

"I must be anachronistic to be so silent
in the face of these empty signs"- Michael Davidson

Ann Lauterbach | Hum | Penguin, 2005

"*Ladies and gentlemen, rock 'n roll.*"

Kimberly Lyons | Saline" | Instance, 2005

"At night, with a fever, the smell is of my own
tongue, swollen, and of a washrag."

More Nick Piombino. Back to directory.

Lee Ann Brown

Peter Culley | Hammertown | New Star, 2003

What a beautiful mind.

Julianna Baggott | This Country of Mothers | Crab Orchard Review & Southern Illinois, 2001

Impressively striking experiential poems on motherhood and being.

Hoa Ngyyen | Your Ancient See Through | Subpress, 2002

A whole different take on integrating motherhood and language: Expressionist!

Tom Phillips | A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel | Thames & Hudson , 1980

I finally got my own copy.

Jonathan Williams | Jubilant Thicket: new & selected poems | Copper Canyon, 2005

Master of the found.

Carl Hancock Rux | Asphalt | Atria Books, 2004

One of the best sex scenes I’ve ever read takes place here in post-apocalyptic Brooklyn brownstone cum fallout shelter (written b4 9/11). Rux rocks.

Nathaniel Dorsky | Devotional Cinema | Tuumba, 2003

Dorsky's enlightening way of seeing transferred to clear beautiful prose monograph on nature of cinema, human perception and ART. One of my fave sections: THE POST FILM EXPERIENCE.

Zilpha Keatley Snyder | The Egypt Game | Dell, 1967

One of my faves circa age 12, upon rereading am impressed by all the late 60’s Civil Rights subtexts.

Monica Bethe & Richard Emmert | Aoinoue: Noh Performance Guide 7 | National Noh Theater, Tokyo, Japan, 1997

Literal translation of Noh play in which a woman is attacked by the ghost of a jealous woman who is alive and who doesn’t know she sends out her spirit as she sleeps. In most productions Aoinoue is played by a kimono.

John Clare | “I AM” The Selected Poetry of John Clare | Jonathan Bate (editor) | FSG, 2003

Peter Culley and I are reading this because we are writing our own “Midsummer Cushion.”

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Katherine Lederer

Elizabeth Willis | Turneresque | Burning Deck, 2003

D. A. Powell | Cocktails | Graywolf, 2004

Claudia Rankine | Don't Let Me Be Lonely | Graywolf, 2004

Phillip Larkin | The Collected Poems | FSG, 2004

John Kenneth Galbraith | The Affluent Society | Mariner, 1998

Thorstein Veblen | Theory of the Leisure Class | Dover, 1994

Janet Malcolm | In the Freud Archives | New York Review of Books, 2002

Janet Malcolm | Reading Chekhov | Random House, 2002

Adam Phillips | Terrors and Experts | Harvard, 1997

Adam Phillips | On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored | Harvard, 1994

Edith Wharton | The Age of Innocence | Modern Library, 1999