A product of Third Factory
Directory of Contributors: Jerrold Shiroma, Bill Berkson, Pam Brown, Simon DeDeo, John Palattella, James Wagner, Jordan Stempleman, Tom Orange, Allyssa Wolf, Laura Carter, Patrick F. Durgin, Michael Scharf, Meredith Quartermain, Simone dos Anjos, Craig Dworkin, Annie Finch, David Dowker, Joshua Clover, Kevin Killian, Graham Foust, Christopher Nealon, John Hyland, Nancy Kuhl, Matvei Yankelevich, Jennifer Scappettone, Chris Pusateri, K. Silem Mohammad, Dana Ward, Anne Boyer, Robert Kelly, Rick Snyder, Jessica Smith, Pierre Joris, John Latta, Amy King, Joshua Edwards, Franklin Bruno, Catherine Taylor, Benjamin Friedlander, Michael Cross, Stephanie Young, Erin Mouré, Susana Gardner, John Sakkis, Michael Gizzi, Anselm Berrigan, and Sina Queyras.
Note: This year's content is also being mirrored, a little at a time, in blog format. Most mentioned titles & authors here, presses here. Many thanks to all who made time to participate! (And if you'd like to contribute next time around, drop me a line). • Few of the works mentioned here circulate in the big box economy. Try the publishers first, failing which head to Bridge Street Books and SPD.
Kamau Brathwaite | DS(2) | New Directions | 2007
Robin Blaser | The Holy Forest | California | 2006
Kristin Prevallet | I, Afterlife [Essay In Mourning Time] | Essay | 2007
Nathalie Stephens | Touch To Affliction | Coach House | 2006
Jacques Rancière | The Future of the Image | Verso | 2007
Heriberto Yépez | Wars. Threesomes. Drafts. & Mothers | Factory School | 2007
Giuliana Bruno | Atlas of Emotion | Verso Books | 2007
Brian Chippendale | Ninja | Picturebox, Inc. | 2006
Alexsandr Zograf | Regards from Serbia | Top Shelf | 2007
Gilbert Hernandez | Heartbreak Soup | Fantagraphics | 2007
Jaime Hernandez | The Girl From H.O.P.P.E.R.S. | Fantagraphics | 2007
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Robert Fisk | The Great War for Civilization: the Conquest of the Middle East | Knopf | 2005
What is to be done?
Paul Schmidt, trans. | The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems | New York Review | 2007
Includes Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Blok as if in deep chat; the worthy Schmidt’s complete Rimbaud is presently remaindered—go snap it up.
Thomas De Quincey | Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets | Penguin | 1972
When English prose was something else.
William Shakespeare | As You Like It | New Variorum Edition | Dover | 1963
“Modern instances”—say no more.
Yvonne Rainer | Feelings Are Facts: A Life | MIT | 2006
A brilliance never slackened.
David M. Vieth, ed. | The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester | Yale | 1962
Except for Auden’s “Platonic Blow,” the only poetry to be both effective pornography and quality lit.
Constance M. Lewallen | The Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s | California | 2006
No substitute for the show itself, of course—which goes to Houston in October.
Harry Mathews | My Life in CIA | Dalkey Archive | 2005
Yes, it is a funny book, but reviewers mistook it for a witticism; read the last ten or so pages slowly.
John Godfrey | Private Lemonade | Adventures in Poetry | 2003
How does a book in which matter and manner are so drastically entwined slip by unnoticed?
Pamela Woof | Dorothy Wordsworth, Writer | Dove Cottage | 2006
Woof is the editor of the Oxford Classics edition of Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals and the widow of Robert Woof who made the Wordsworth Trust and its museum the wonder it is. This little book has a tremendous sympathetic intensity, akin to Aileen Ward’s biography of Keats.
Ron Padgett | How To Be Perfect | Coffee House | 2007
Substantial—maybe our only genuinely philosophical poet—and as light and invigorating as the airiest morning air.
Bill Berkson’s latest books are Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently (The Owl Press, 2007) and Sudden Address: Selected Lectures 1981-2006 (Cuneiform Press, 2007).
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Juan Goytisolo | Cinema Eden : Essays From The Muslim Mediterranean | Sickle Moon | 2003
“As Bakhtin shows in his remarkable study of the world and writing of Rabelais, there was a time when the real and the imaginary mingled, names supplanted the things they designated and newly invented words were wholeheartedly put to use: they grew, broadened out, shacked up, gave birth like creatures of flesh and blood”—the first paragraph of this beguiling book’s opening essay on Morocco, where Juan Goytisolo now lives. Morocco, Egypt, Turkey—the Islamic shores of the Mediterranean are studied, comprehended and celebrated in this great Spanish writer’s utterly unique style, brought into English by his long-term translator, Peter Bush.
Elisabeth A. Frost and Cynthia Hogue, eds.| innovative women poets | Iowa | 2006
“An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews”—a collection of fourteen in-depth interviews with experimental women poets of the last forty years, including lengthy selections of their poems and good brief introductions to each poet. It’s a fascinating and enriching book. The poets are the late Gloria Evangelina Anzaldua, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Jayne Cortez, Rachel Blau du Plessis, Alice Fulton, Susan Howe, Harryette Mullen, Alice Notley, Alicia Ostriker, Sonia Sanchez, Leslie Scalapino, C.D. Wright and (the late) Barbara Guest and Kathleen Fraser.
Martin Edmond | Waimarino County & other excursions | Auckland | 2007
An enthralling collection of discursive essays and short prose works concerned with memory, travelling, imagination and dreaming, identity and “other excursions” by Sydney-based writer Martin Edmond who comes originally from Ohakune, Waimarino County, New Zealand.
Philip Nikolayev | Letters From Aldenderry | Salt | 2006
A witty new collection of poems rich in irony and language-play informed by Philip Nikolayev’s Russian/English bilinguality, and it’s lyrical to boot. A true pleasure to read.
Craig Billingham | storytelling | Five Islands | 2007
A small, first collection of thought-filled, closely written lyric poems that talk to you about the detail in things, the nuances in relationship, the freshness of the foreign—all made with a deliberate yet light touch. As one of the poet’s travelling companions pleads—“less theory, more poems please!”
Tinfish 17 | Ed. Susan Schultz | 2007
As terrific as ever, Hawa’ii-based Tinfish fulfils a great role in representing broadly-Pacific poetries. It’s essential, surprising, brilliant. From Taipei to Portland to Korea to San Francisco to Oceania and beyond, this magazine chips away at euro-centrism with gusto.
The Poker 8 | Ed. Daniel Bouchard | 2007
Always stimulating, The Poker issue 8, as well as a varied selection of poems by well-regarded contemporaries, has a lengthy and engaging conversation between the poet Jennifer Moxley and the editor, Dan Bouchard that ranges in topic through translation, sleeping, gradual development (aging), personal relationship and so on—in relation to her writing practice.
Elsewhere 1.1-3 | Gary Sullivan | 2005 - 07
I’ve only recently discovered Gary Sullivan’s great comics. For example—Elsewhere 2, a collaboration with poet Nada Gordon, is 24 pages of multi-cultural images drawn from a walk up Coney Island Avenue, Brooklyn. The comic's text is by Nada Gordon, modelled on Frank O'Hara's ‘Second Avenue’ and written from notes taken on a bus trip down Coney Island Avenue in the opposite direction. As the song says, it's “a great big melting pot” and it's wonderful too.
Meng Jiao | bird in an empty city | Association of Stories in Macao | 2007
Tang Dynasty poet (751-814) who flunked his Imperial Examinations and ended up living in poverty but he also managed to travel in Hunan, Hubei and Guangxi. A selection made from his 500 surviving poems, co-translated by Australian poet Christopher Kelen with colleagues Hilda Tam and Amy Wong.
Habib Tengour | Traverser | Rumeur des Ages | 2002
Habib Tengour is a Maghrebian poet, dividing his time between Algeria and France where he lectures in sociology. His poems, although often autobiographical, challenge the norm via imagery. Written in French—I am translating-to-read, very slowly.
Joe Amato | Industrial Poetics : Demo Tracks for a Mobile Culture | Iowa | 2006
At first I found that I was resistant to the book. Its notes and bullet-style presentation seemed a bit scrappy but then, as I kept reading, I began to follow Joe Amato's thinking on “how to tell the difference between life and art” more receptively and I started to enjoy and empathise with most of the segments (esp. the recounting of board meetings and job interviews from a poet’s viewpoint.) Joe Amato analyses the places ‘art’ is given by the ‘real world’ very convincingly and he firmly upholds a belief in whatever it is that makes poetry a “mysterious” artform. This book creeps up—persistence is rewarded.
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Cathy Park Hong | Dance Dance Revolution | Norton | 2007
Now samsy, grab un gun. BB down de riving ravens,
de vermin fatted jays, y jade headed mallards who wit
insolence nest en botany o our #3 prize-winnim plants,
who dae nest en hearts o Russkies sculpt en shurbbery.
It’s hard to say which is more unexpected: the bizarre patois spoken throughout this book (mostly phonetic-spelled pidgin English, with shots of Latin), or the fact that it was picked by Adrienne Rich. Some of the best verses of 2007 in here, with a narrative architecture that makes the book a triumph.
Simon Critchley | Infinitely Demanding | Verso | 2007
Critchley’s readings of some of the emerging “new canon,” in the context of Levinas, Lacan and others, in the service of a reconstructed ethics that avoids the Scylla and Charybdis of eudaemonia and utilitarianism, is I think an example of the best of what we can hope from from America’s encounter with contemporary European thought.
Cole Swensen | The Glass Age | Alice James | 2007
While there’s nothing in general that distinguishes The Glass Age from the dozens of other books that Swensen has churned out at the University of Iowa, my particular encounter with it crystalized a number of ideas about failure and fraud in American poetry, and spurred two essays, “the defeasible pause” and “silence == freedom?” published on rhubarb is susan.
Alison Gingeras | John Currin | Rizzoli | 2006
Currin’s definitive coffeetable. He paints the way I think many poets—or at least I—should write. I saw his wife standing next to a giant painting of herself naked at the Whitney. Future publishers be aware: I want Thanksgiving on the cover of my first book. Let’s talk.
Lisa Robertson | XEclogue | New Star | 1999
XEclogue, along with Hong’s book mentioned above, should really be considered the strongest arguments-by-example for the contemporary power of narration in poetry. Robertson—the thinking woman’s Anne Carson—builds such a bizarre world of bellettristic correspondence that you can’t help but want to be BFF with everyone who lives there.
Daniel Guerin, Noam Chomsky, et al. | Anarchism from Theory to Practice | Monthly Review | 1996
A vital book for my own reasoning about the possibilities of contemporary poetry; a sourcebook for two essays in absent magazine, “towards an anarchist poetics,” and “fuck you, aloha, ecopoiesis.”
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge | I Love Artists | California | 2006
Berssenbrugge is a female writer: more, a feminine one. Along with Nicole Brossard (another discovery of 2007), reading her selected is an exploration of a—subtly, but strangely—ritualized environment.
Akiko Fukai, et al. | Fashion: A History from the 18th to 20th Century: the Collection of the Kyoto Costume Institute | Taschen | 2006
If—as the tired expression goes—we should write a poetry “of the body”, then we owe it to our readers to learn as much as we can about the poetry on it. The Kyoto Costume Institute presents its collection in an amazing fashion, with mannequins that are as expressive as the clothes they hang. This is a gorgeous two volume edition, and also a bit of a sourcebook for recent writing of my own that tries to inhabit a woman-loaded space.
Tom Mandel | Letters of the Law | Sun and Moon | 1994
A chance mention on Ron Silliman’s blog brought me to Mandel’s work, whose Judaic torque on what I think is an elsewhere tired Michael Palmer mode thrilled me for days.
Eugene Ostashevsky | infinite recursor or the bride of dj spinoza | Ugly Duckling | 2006
I couldn’t decide whether to list this, or his translations of a 20th Russian poetic movement that does disturbingly similar—but better—poetry than the average “post-avant”. In the end, infinite recursor, a graphic comic opera, really has to be considered in the same field as Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.
Anne Somerset | Elizabeth I | Anchor | 2003
My own poetic, as opposed to critical, work this year has focused on (rhetorical) apostrophes. With speakers and adressees that include Willow Rosenberg and Queen Boudica, I’ve been doing plenty of reading by and about women simultaneously powerful and violent. I would love to hear from attention span readers of less obvious ones—particuarly outisde the Western tradition—that I might be expected to overlook.about contributor • back to directory • blog format
Roberto Bolaño | By Night in Chile | New Directions | 2003
Roberto Bolaño | Distant Star | New Directions | 2004
Roberto Bolaño | Last Evenings on Earth | New Directions | 2006
Roberto Bolaño | The Savage Detectives | FSG | 2007
Richard C. Cobb | Paris and Elsewhere | New York Review | 2004
Peter Gizzi | The Outernationale | Wesleyan UP | 2007
Susan Howe | My Emily Dickinson | North Atlantic | 1985
Jennifer Moxley | The Line | Post-Apollo | 2007
Ezra Pound | Collected Poetry Recordings | Pennsound | 2006
James Schuyler | Selected Poems | FSG | 1988; 2007
Eliot Weinberger | An Elemental Thing | New Directions | 2007
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Benjamin Friedlander | The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes | Subpress | 2007
Tight little lyrical dramas.
John R. Soares | 75 Hikes in California’s Mount Shasta & Lassen Volcanic National Park Regions | The Mountaineers Books | 2006, revised edition
An unexpectedly deepening interest of mine.
Jeff Hull | Spoor | Subpress | 2002
The Ear Inn introductions are very nice.
Dodie Bellamy | Academonia | Krupskaya | 2006
Yes, disturbing. Yes, funny. Yes, experimenting. But it’s really the fearless drive for opening herself up/into various areas that keeps one reading these great essays.
Gary Lutz | Partial List of People to Bleach | Future Tense | 2007
Seven fictions. More complex cringing, misunderstandings, and power struggles behind and outside walls. I never tire of Gary’s worlds.
Ellen Lupton; J. Abbott Miller | The Bathroom, The Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste—A Process of Elimination | Princeton Architectural Press | 1996
A diamond.
Juliana Spahr | The Transformation | Atelos | 2007
Intense, personal, specific, painful, with reassembling diction.
Jocelyn Saidenberg | Negativity | Atelos | 2006
Currently reading. I feel this sense of information handed off to other hands handing it off once more. And so forth.
Anne Boyer | Selected Dreams with a Note on Phrenology | Dusie | 2007
This is pretty much a perfect little book.
Hannah Weiner | Hannah Weiner’s Open House | Kenning | 2007
I’m grateful to have this.
César Vallejo, trans. Clayton Eshleman | The Complete Poetry | California | 2007
“Thrips uprear to adhere / to joints, to the base, to napes, / to the underface of numerators on foot. / Thrips and thrums from lupine heaps.”
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Anthony McCann | Moongarden | Wave | 2006
The humor arrives perfectly synced with all the terrible upsets and effects of the mind.
Sabrina Orah Mark | The Babies | Saturnalia | 2004
Similar to stumbling into a neighbor's backyard party well into the night, and for hours, listening to the first person who has all the stories.
Paul Hoover | Poems in Spanish | Omnidawn | 2005
This is what happens when language spends enough years with itself, and then discovers it did need someone to clearly feel it.
Amy King | I'm the Man Who Loves You | BlaxeVOX | 2007
With impossibility comes the imagination, arrangements of the landscape that will account for what can only be taken in for so long. It is here all unfolds.
Donald Revell | Invisible Green: Selected Prose | Omnidawn | 2005
No, I do not work for Omnidawn. They do this all on their own, with their own ears. And truly, I should add Aaron Shurin's magnificent book, Involuntary Lyrics, to my list, also from Omnidawn. But to say something about Revell's prose, read the first essay, and there will be no more difficulties in waking up each morning as a poet.
Tom Beckett | Unprotected Texts: Selected Poems 1978-2006 | Meritage Press | 2006
Nothing here is ignored, so all is cherished, even the zombies, friction, of course, the friction.
Graham Foust | Necessary Stranger | Flood | 2006
The controlled line, left to age those seconds it takes to jump those intolerably safe associations.
William Bronk | Life Supports | North Point | 1982
“There is no one we know could give the world away.”
Armand Schwerner | The Tablets | National Poetry Foundation | 1999
Nothing like it. Gilgamesh unpolished, untranslatable, unabashed, unclothed.
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Laynie Browne | Daily Sonnets | Counterpath | 2007
Deerhoof | Reveille; Apple O'; Milk Man; The Runners Four | Kill Rock Stars | 2002-05
Stephen Duncombe | Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy | New Press | 2007
Philip Jenkins | Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America | Oxford | 2006
Beth Joselow | Begin at Once | Chax | 2007
Doug Lang | dc poetry blog | http://douglangsdcpoetryblog.blogspot.com | 2007-
Nathaniel Mackey | Splay Anthem | New Directions | 2006
Harryette Mullen | Recyclopedia | Graywolf | 2006
Linda Russo | Mirth | Chax | 2007
Bela Tarr | Werckmeister Harmonies | Facets Video | 2000
Ryan Walker | bathybius blog | bathybius.com | 2006-
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Rosmarie Waldrop | Another Language | Talisman | 1997
William T. Vollman | Poor People | Ecco | 2007
Philip Jenks | My first painting will be "The Accuser" | Zephyr | 2005
Brett Easton Ellis | The Informers | Knopf | 1994
Sappho, trans. Anne Carson | If Not, Winter | Virago | 2003
Jon Leon | Hit Wave | manuscript | 2007
Cansei De Ser Sexy | Let's Make Love (and Listen to Death From Above) | Sub Pop | 2006
Frida Hyvönen | Djuna!, & You Never Got Me Right | Secretly Canadian | 2006
Joan Baez | Silver Dagger | Vanguard | 1960
Lars Von Trier | Manderlay | n.a. | 2005
Vice Television | http://www.vbs.tv/
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Alice Notley | Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2005 | Wesleyan | 2006
Alice Notley | Alma, or the Dead Women | Granary | 2006
Ange Mlinko | The Children’s Museum | Prefontaine | 2007
David Shapiro | The Selected Poems of David Shapiro | Overlook | 2007
Anne Boyer | Selected Dreams with a Note on Phrenology | Dusie | 2007
Anne Boyer | Anne Boyer’s Good Apocalypse | Effing | 2006
Joseph Ceravolo | The Green Lake Is Awake | Coffee House | 1994
David Shapiro | A Man Holding an Acoustic Panel | Dutton | 1971
Laura Moriarty | Nude Memoir | Krupskaya | 2000
Ben Lerner | The Lichtenberg Figures | Copper Canyon | 2004
Christopher Nealon | The Joyous Age | Black Square | 2004
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