p-ramblings

The Asemic Issue of Moria is live.

Check out this new Kickstarter project that I posted and give something for it. I'm trying to see if this is a viable way of funding a project.

The Daily Glance

Labels: Daily Glance

I'm looking for poets and fiction writers who reside in Chicago to send me work for an upcoming issue of PoetsArtists.

The call is here: http://poetsandartists.com/the-chicago-issue/

Also here:

PoetsArtists invites poets and fiction writers who reside/work in the Chicago area to submit work to our Chicago issue. Send your work along with a short bio to William Allegrezza (wallegrezza@gmail.com), the guest editor for literary submissions. Please attach your work as a doc., .txt, .docx, or .rtf file and put CHICAGO in the subject line. If we are interested in publishing your work, we will contact you for a photograph of yourself and for you to approve the layout. (Please note that you do not need to write about Chicago, just live/work in the area.)

Bologna in Prosa has silently returned.

some years ago, in temporal nomads i wrote the lines:

you could ask for pillan
when the columns are dense
when thirteen is your number and you
are infinite
on wings
as the circle closes

they seem to apply again tonight. pillan is the supreme god of the araucanian tribes in south america. in essence, he is a thunder god, and in these lines he is being called upon “as the circle closes” in the midst of battle. the person is lost though is growing or feeling “infinite” at the end.

not long after penning these lines, i wrote the following ones as the beginning to a poem in Fragile Replacements.

closed gates within

i unplugged the cords and
switched off anything switchable
into silence

the two poems are connected in my head, and though tonight i feel ready to write the third of this triptych, i find that the first two express what i want to say, and that makes me, in a wild jump, think of emerson and how he states that poets express what the rest of us want to say, so i am left wondering how many poets feel their earlier poems explain their present sentiments.

Out from Otoliths — Densities, Apparitions by William Allegrezza
Now out from Otoliths.


Densities, Apparitions
William Allegrezza
80 pages
Cover image by Deborah Meadows
Otoliths, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9808785-8-5
$13.45 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/densities-apparitions/17278481

This book explores influence by crossing out or responding to poets who have influenced me. The Whitman and Andrade pieces are cross-outs, and anyone familiar with the first version of Calamus will notice that I did not respond to the entire collection. I left out pieces that I did not think would cut well for my project or pieces that have too much personal meaning for me. The response pieces to Leopardi and Neruda are probably even more telling, for in these pieces, it is sometimes difficult to see how the pieces directly relate to the original. Still, the influence is there reworked through my experience. —William Allegrezza


William Allegrezza edits the e-zine Moria and teaches at Indiana University Northwest. He has previously published five books, In the Weaver's Valley, Ladders in July, Fragile Replacements, Collective Instant, and Covering Over; two anthologies, The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century and La Alteración del Silencio: Poesía Norteamericana Reciente; seven chapbooks, including Sonoluminescence (co-written with Simone Muench) and Filament Sense (Ypolita Press); and many poetry reviews, articles, and poems. He founded and curated series A, a reading series in Chicago, from 2006-2010. In addition, he occasionally posts his thoughts at http://allegrezza.blogspot.com.

Labels: moving

check out my new e-book, inshore seeds, with argotist at http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Ebooks%20index.htm or download it here.

The Daily Glance

Thomas Fink's Peace Conference is filled with shaped poems and lyric utterances. Partially, this book seems like an exploration of form that takes up what Fink has done in other books. The shaped poems that begin the book are fascinating because they are non-standard shapes with some stanzas (if they can be called that) that are formed like x's and some that do not connect. These forms complicate the reading process, especially when Fink plays with narrative lines with quick shifts in topic. (I wish that I could reproduce these here, but I think I'd have to use a pdf or photo to do that.) Beyond the shaped poems, Fink plays with new forms; for example, he creates a series that combines a prose poem with a hay(na)ku. It looks like a haibun but is something different. It's amazing how much he manages to pack into his pieces:

Why are you worrying about teeth? They'll be dead teeth. I'm careful about
what I buy. We found ourselves--ages ago--strewn together in a store, on a
rock. Nowadays he really favors the candy-stripper variety. They're perky, so
I indulge him.

This section is from a series titled "Dusk Bowl Intimacies," and the series seems to me to be one of the most interesting poetic series that I've read in quite some time. He plays lyrically with different voices, explores a new form, and combines cultural poetic traditions.

One last note, the poetry in the book is wonderful but so is the front cover art. Fink is a painter as well, and the piece displayed on the front cover is fabulous and contains forms that repeat in the book.

Labels: Daily Glance

po-biz lesson of the day, #168790

when you hear strange footsteps
at night, do not try to reach enlightenment,
just shoot.

Labels: po-biz

The Daily Glance

Deborah Meadows’ Saccade Patterns is firmly rooted in experimental poetic practice; she uses a variety of techniques to explore difficult topics, from how we relate to each other to the erotic, and the poems themselves are beautifully put together, even when very dense. Ultimately, she raises more questions than she answers. Take the first lines of “Historically speaking”:

This precise eucalyptus bark peels down—
it’s how the tree narrows down possibility

yet placed here, they must adore
the equation: the hinge between
here and there, zero and quadratic items,
unripe earth and fraught sky, loose confederacy towards
a skimpy democratic plan.

Well, are we talking about peeling bark or something else here? Just look at the lines. "This precise eucalyptus"--which one? Just some tree she's looking at, or is the poem metaphorically a tree shedding bark? And the peeling, does that narrow down possibility? Why, because of the shedding of other bits? Then we skip a space and begin a new stanza. Is the narrative continued or have we started something new? For example, if the bark or tree is placed here, wherever here may be, then, it becomes an equation for narrowing possibility? Or is that some other equation? Is it a hinge? Or is that something else? It's easy to see how the myriad bark pieces could be a loose confederacy, but are we still talking about the bark? Is this about the poem, the words becoming a confederacy? Or is this some accumulation of equations, or coupled items ("here and there," "zero and quadratic items," earth and sky)? Basically, is she leading us through a complicated analogy or using quick shifts from idea to idea (which would go well with the title of the book)? I'm not sure, but the questions that arise when reading the poems are fascinating, and the language of the book carries me through it easily.

Labels: Daily Glance

The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Jen Hofer's Lead & Tether is a collection of daily cut ups from newspapers in the town she's in for the day--L.A., N.Y., Washington, and Tijuana. The cover of the chapbook is made with newspaper laminated and sown together. The poems themselves, in both English and Spanish, vary, but there is definitely a layer of social/political commentary that carries throughout the collection:

muted
incessantly
revolution
to market
People now
want something

[Please note that I have not retained her spacing and her text comes from a cut up]

Hofer's use of the newspaper text for criticism news makes the individual pieces interesting, but even more, this chapbook typifies what is great about the Dusie Kollectiv project. Hofer tells us where she was on a specific day, she tells us that the chapbooks are hand-stitched, and she tells us in a note what the project is for. Basically, she grounds the project in a specific individual at a specific time, and to have a copy of the project is to have a craft object in your hands. In essence, it's a stand, granted a small one, against the corporate nature of contemporary art, and it does so by mixing mass produced text (the newspaper) with individual crafting (arrangement and sowing).

Labels: Daily Glance, The Kollectiv

The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Deborah Poe's chapbook the last will be stone, too contains five short poems. It's no big secret that I typically like Poe's work, and this short collection is no exception. The poems are full of interesting juxtapositions and sonorous language. Take this lines from "A Lot Names Marooned":

Language and meander when geographies yesterday. The fragments all map.

So much is happening in lines like this one that this chapbook demands contemplative reading. These two sentences seem to relate, but the relation is not clear. Is language on the map? Are the fragments language? Are we meandering in yesterday's geographies when using language? (Or did I just rearrange the syntax for my own meaning purposes?)

My favorite poem in the chapbook is "Death Mix," a poem that takes its line from Paul Celan. I don't know that I can say what the poem is about, if about anything, but the sound of it is enchanting.

Labels: Daily Glance, The Kollectiv

Sometimes I will rewrite a poem from scratch over and over until I think I have come up with something. Often, I come up with nothing, and I abandon the piece. I abandoned the following piece(s), but I enjoyed the process. The following are a response to a poem about stone arrangements like Stonehenge in the U.K. I will leave the poet I’m responding to unnamed. It was not an especially good poem, and these are not especially good responses.

1.

in looking at stones,

you imagine a story

of the gods, of the

overwhelming sense

of the sacred they evoke,

assuming it rests in

the stones and not

in you.

2.

the stones, you say,

are sacred, but

they are just stones,

while you, poet, friend,

are a creator

looking for redemption.

3.

you hold a stone,

turning it in your hand,

trying to figure out

how it came to be,

seeing in it shapes,

potential places

it could be.

4.

poet,

fuck you and your stones,

you and your smug

academic lines.

the stones stand beyond you,

if they stand, and you,

with your alliteration

and scattered diphthongs,

will die.

The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Tilla Brading and Frances Presley's piece for the Dusie Kollectiv is essentially a short one page form that can be read as many poems or a single one. The page is divided by lines into squares (24 of them), and each square contains at least one word (only one has two words) or number. There is no clue as to whether or not we should read the page up, down, diagonally, top to bottom, etc. . ., and there's no indication as to whether or not all the words should be used. Basically, the reader is left with all the decisions about how to interpret this piece. The only guides are the words, but stripped of their syntax, they require us to do much more work that we might ordinarily do. The words themselves, things like "Bolivian," "porous," "tidy!", bring up questions of word choice by poets. Are certain words more poetic? Are certain combinations poetic? How much of the poetic is learned? (These questions I think are incidental to this work, but interesting deviations.)

Labels: Daily Glance, The Kollectiv

The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Maria Damon's meshwards defies expectations of poetry chapbooks. It looks like a traditional one, but it consists of pictures of words and letters stitched on fabric. Below the fabric photos are brief descriptions of the occasions that gave rise to the stitching. Some of the projects are directly related to poetry events or people, such as one for Charles Bernstein's family and one for Mark Nowak. Some, however, just contain words, such as one with the word Respect for Damon's mother. The projects are fun to see, but really they add a layer to the way I see Damon's work as a whole. I was already a fan, but now I imagine her playing with words like thread in myriad colors.

Labels: Daily Glance, The Kollectiv

The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Carrie Hunter's Poetry Reading traces her experiences of poetry readings. The chapbook consists of quotations of poetry readings with each reader's words being given a different font. A list of the readers and fonts is provided, but really this chapbook is a found piece that relies on jarring juxtapositions and interesting turns of phrases. To me this poem is interesting in what it connects on the page but also in what it points us to in the readings. With it, I keep finding myself asking how the fragments would fit into the original context.

"That voice trajectory can't hear us"

"Possibly with a typist or an easel"

"Is a shadow a real shadow?"

"Transparent nudity grew"

Labels: Daily Glance, The Kollectiv

With sadness I’ve read the many articles of late claiming the death of Comparative Literature in the U.S. The programs are dying here while they are expanding rapidly in countries on the rise (India and China, for example). The complaint in U.S. against the program usually goes that Comparative Literature teachers often usurp others’ areas of research and that their presentations are limited because the teachers/scholars do not know as much as individual area scholars. Embedded in this complaint is also the idea that Comparative Literature scholars are too concerned with concepts of national literatures. Such scholars are even the butt of jokes, e.g. “We need someone to teach these three totally unrelated things. Let’s get a Comp. Lit. person.” Ironically, these complaints come at a time when the Humanities are being asked to justify their places for academic funding, and, if you’ve heard some of the arguments, they seem to be fumbling in finding justification. To me, the arguments for keeping Comparative Literature, especially in our more global world, are apparent, and unfortunately, the decline in Comparative Literature programs in the U.S. signals to me are more fundamental decline in the U.S. university system.

Comparative Literature came of age in the U.S. in the postwar period. The original stirring for such a field came out of the 19th century desire for a world literature and to explain how we are all connected. In the postwar period, Comparative Literature steadied then grew briefly as a field mostly concerned with European literatures, and it is easy to critique the works from this period as being too highly focused on national literatures. Since then we’ve seen the rise of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature has become a home for theory. On the one hand, the field seems to have deconstructed itself, and on the other hand it seems to have become, at least some would suggest, irrelevant because Cultural Studies has taken over. By the time I took graduate classes, the field seemed wide open as long as one could jump through several language traditions. That was its saving grace for me because I found English departments mired in academic traditions, personalities, and national literatures. I started in a large English department filled with theory classes but with only literature classes from the British, Irish (represented in its entirety by Yeats), and American strains of English. What about the other Englishes? Of the islands? Of down under? Of Africa? What about looking at influences on English speaking writers from other languages? Comparative Literature was the field I turned to that allowed for such exploration.

I understand the complaints against Comparative Literature. Will a Comp. Lit. person know as much Middle English as a Middle English scholar? Probably not, and in a decent-sized department, the Middle English scholar should teach classes in that area. In a large department where there are scholars in other Englishes like Australian, Indian, West African, East African, etc. . ., then such scholars should teach classes in those areas; however, Comp. Lit. scholars definitely have an advantage in a smaller school; plus, they have linguistics training beyond that of most other scholars. In addition, I have heard from many English graduate students how they could complete a minor exam for their language components for a doctorate. That is not true for Comp. Lit. students. Where I went, we had to take classes in three language traditions, and that is the bare minimum for most programs. That meant that we had to work in the different fields, to talk to people really in other disciples, and see the connections between language traditions and literary traditions—also clearly experience the loss of translation.

I’m not suggesting that everyone head to Comp. Lit. I have some brilliant colleagues whose knowledge of their specialty areas is marvelous to explore, but the decline of Comp. Lit. programs seems to me fundamentally tied to a problem in higher education. We are shrinking one of our most diverse and global humanities programs at a time when we should be growing it. Essentially, can global Cultural Studies realistically take place in English departments, i.e. single language tradition departments?

The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Michelle Naka Pierce's Symptom of Color is an amazing chapbook, and I didn't expect it to be. I don't mean that because of the poet--this is the first time that I've read her work. I mean that when I picked up the chapbook and flipped the pages, it just looked like another prose poem collection, but to classify it as that would be a gross understatement. When I began reading, I quickly realized that the prose poems continue across two pages. While my first reaction was to read down one page as is typical, I realized that the lines did not fit exactly and that they continue across the border of the page. In addition, I quickly realized that the poems continue (literally the lines break) on subsequent pages. She's crossing both the border of the page in the book but of continuing pages. You might not think crossing pages is that significant, but with prose poems of five lines, it seems quite different. In addition, as the narrative builds in the collection, she adds another short poem below the main ones on the page. The short poems continue in the same way, and it causes the conundrum of how to read one narrative at the top of the page while not letting the one at the bottom slip by.

Beyond the actual experience of reading is the content, which is mostly about being on a border. In one sense, it's about being on the border of a painting and what that means in the context of a museum. In a more personal level, it's about being on a cultural border and trying to negotiate that. For her, it's about being from a Japanese family in the U.S. She brings up how people in the U.S. see her and also how she is seen in Japan ("you will always be a gaijin"). The way she structures the reading experience in this book mirrors the content. It makes us, readers who might or might not be negotiating borders in a similar way, negotiate the borders of the book, a cultural experiment, to figure out how to make sense of it.

This chapbook definitely makes me want to check out the rest of her published work.

Labels: Daily Glance, The Kollectiv

The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Chris Pusateri's Molecularity is a book that plays with sound. As a sonic experiment, the content of the work seems secondary, especially since many words repeat in ways that shift meanings. Sometimes such experiments can be tedious, but this one is not. In fact, I wish this one came with a cd of Pusateri reading it.

new origin spigot. electric saw starting. live-fire exercise, the world in which you work.

new origin spigot. were cold corporeal. fall foul. full stop; something in the chill of it.

In many ways, lines like these are assonance experiments. Just look at the s's and w's in the first line and the c's and f's in the second line. Add on the anaphora, and the lines become sound play, with the spigot perhaps just beings the vocal cords/mouth cavity. One could even go through this book looking at the arrangement plosives and fricatives (and glides, considering the first line here). It's short enough to be exciting without being overwhelming.

Labels: Daily Glance, The Kollectiv

The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Krystal Languell's many lost cause creatures could form a very sad list is a fun book to read because it's like one giant rant through individual prose poems. Languell packs a lot of energy into her mostly four to five line prose poems. She gets in rants about sexism, academia, mortality, the poetry world, prepackaged food, and capitalism.

Will I know what killed me? The fish sticks the hot dogs

Or

Advanced degrees are not inherently evil but people are working hard for change. Every academic is guilty of "my diamond shoes are too tight" logical fallacies.

Are there arguments here? Not really, but the rants are fun, and this is poetry, not a philosophical treatise on the evils of contemporary life of which we are part.

Formally, the prose poems works well here. I've grown less fond of the form lately because so many people use it, and they often use it in ways that seem to lose its power. Languell does not have that problem. These are fast and interesting.

Labels: Daily Glance, The Kollectiv

The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Paul Klinger's chapbook Jumblefate is a pocket-sized work that is sown together. While I enjoyed reading it, I'm not sure if I understand the concept that ties it together. The short pieces in the book could either be individual pieces or, more likely, part of a long poem. They are interesting on their own, but there seems to be some nature/woods/forest theme tying the book together.

In a field

Allure

rim

On a tiny

Shallow

Vine-like
Step

Fairly late

Most of the poems in the work have this weightless feel, except for the opening poem. I'd interested in seeing how this piece fits into the context of a book of Klinger's work.

Labels: Daily Glance, The Kollectiv

The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Lynn Behrendt's Acquiescence is quite disturbing if read on a surface level. It's like having the title of Levertov's Breathing the Water turned into a poem. By that, I mean that the chapbook is one long poem describing someone acquiescing to water. Each stanza is two short lines, as if the lines mirror the slow process she's describing of drowning.

let go the edge
blue rim, water

sink down into it
stop breathing

if it hurts
just stop

The actual description of someone drowning is not fun to read, but the way she describes the process is interesting because she brings up giving into something deeper, giving in to that which surrounds you. Also, she shifts between first person and second person, almost suggesting that the experience is bigger than a single person, as if it is something we all experience. And that, of course, brings up the question of whether or not we need to read the experience of drowning, of giving into something, as metaphoric for something else. Basically, are we in the realm of allegory? Funny enough, I don't find myself asking that much with contemporary work.

Beyond the content, the chapbook is a great example for showing why I like the Kollectiv. The chapbook is just larger than a business card, and it folds out like one long piece of paper. It also comes in a sleeve made from a cut up map--mine includes water and land, but I'm sure they are all slightly different.

Labels: Daily Glance, The Kollectiv

The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Labels: Daily Glance, The Kollectiv

The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Labels: Daily Glance, The Kollectiv

The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Labels: Daily Glance, The Kollectiv

The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Labels: Daily Glance, The Kollectiv

The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Labels: Daily Glance, The Kollectiv

The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Labels: Daily Glance, The Kollectiv

As oddly shaped, taped, hand-cut packages, chapbooks from the Dusie Kollectiv have started to fill my mail box. Bills, junk, and poetry--that's all I get in the mail now. If you don't know the Kollectiv, you should. It's my third time as part of it, and I've decided to write a little about some of the chapbooks that show up. If you are not part of the Kollectiv, you can either wait until the .pdfs are online at Dusie or beg the poet for a spare copy.

Labels: The Kollectiv

the mini reviews will return soon. for now, here are some english variation poems.

The final Series A sound page from when I was the curator.  It does not contain the early readings, but it has most of them from 2007-2010.

The Daily Glance

Maggie Nelson's Bluets is a book about the color blue, and in it she manages to discuss depression, relationships, meaning, and faith. In her discussion, she brings in a long list of characters from Sei Shonagon to Emerson to Wittgenstein, to Stein. The pieces, perhaps short prose, perhaps prose poetry, are numbered and read like a meandering novel that's focused on the personal. In it, she explains why she picked blue and contemplates the different meanings of blue. She also just admires the color in its various forms. Different themes seem to weave through the numbers of the pieces, coming back like a sub-plot in a novel, so as I reader I started to look forward to different themes returning.

71. I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity
in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do.

Labels: Daily Glance

Poets of the Daily Glance so Far

Elizabeth Kate Switaj, Kimberly Lyons, Joel Chace, Elisabeth Workman, Paul Nelson, Fanny Howe, Rachel Blau Duplessis, Srečko Kosovel, Jane Sprague, Carrie Etter, Lisa Samuels, Jennifer Kronovet, Michelle Taransky, JS van Buskirk, Aaron Kunin, Andrew Joron, E. Tracy Grinnell, Mairéad Byrne, Bob Marcacci, Susan Tichy, Gengoro, Geoffrey Gatza, Steve Dalachinsky, Nate Pritts, Adam Czerniawski, Sandra Doller, Don Mager, Vernon Frazer, Skip Fox, Aileen Ibardaloza, William Stobb, Kaia Sand, Bill Lavender, Catherine Daly, Lance Phillips, Marthe Reed, Adam Strauss, C. S. Giscombe, Sandra Beasley, Patrick Rosal, Reb Livingston, Ravi Shankar, Jason Bredle, Kyle Schlesinger,Chad Sweeney, Brenda Cárdenas, Suzanne Buffam, Mónica de la Torre, Steve Timm, C. J. Martin, Kristy Bowen, Jennifer Chang, Cathy Park Hong, Aaron Belz, Evie Shockley, Luis Humberto Valadez, Katy Lederer, Lara Glenum, Jim Behrle, Jean Vengua, Hoa Nguyen, Karen Leona Anderson, Michael Slosek, Richard Price, Virna Teixeira, Matina Stamatakis, Cindy Savett, Devin Johnston, Nick Demske, Marie Buck, Eileen Tabios, Melissa Severin, mIEKAL aND, Maria Damon, Gina Myers, Amy King, Steve Halle, Jesse Glass, Jen Hofer, Logan Ryan Smith, Lina ramona Vitkauskas, Paul Siegell, rob mclennan, Emily Carr, Simone Muench, Gregory Betts, Christine Hamm, Lisa Gill, Mark Young, Paolo Javier, Piotr Gwiazda, Justin Marks, Nathalie Stephens, Erica Bernheim, Kate Greenstreet, Chris Daniels, Flávia Rocha, Brian Clements, Anthony Hawley, Joseph Wood, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, Francisco Aragón, Hugh Tibbey, Eric Baus, Steve Davenport, Anne Gorrick, K. Lorraine Graham, Barbara Jane Reyes, Christophe Casamassima, Ana Božičević, Ray Hsu, Mark Salerno, Sarah Rosenthal, Adam Fieled, Chris Glomski, Sheila Murphy, deborah meadows, John Coletti, Tim Gaze, Pat Clifford, Aryanil Mukerjee, Elisa Gabbert, Kathleen Rooney, Angela Szczepaniak, Brandi Homan, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Thomas Fink, Geof Huth, Dmitry Golynko, CAConrad, Frank Sherlock, Kim Gek Lin Short, Susana Gardner, Johannes Görasson, Jennifer K. Dick, John Beer, Márton Koppány, nick-e melville, Crag Hill, Grzegorz Wróblewski, Liaizon Wakest, Jen Tynes, Richard Fox, Mary Kasimor, Elizabeth Robinson, Truong Tran, Jerome Rothenberg, Louis Cabri, Mark Nowak, Nick Twemlow, Jill Magi, Tommassina Squadrito, Biagio Cepollaro, Hiromi Ito, Dorothea Lasky', Bill Knott, John Bennett, Susan Holbrook, Feliano Soriano, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Lauren Levin, Jared Stanley, Cahterine Theis, Rodney Koeneke, Jill Stengel, Chris Tonelli, Mackenzie Carignan, Jake Berry, Brian Teare, Rachel Zucker, Joshua Beckman, Ange Mlinko, Donora Hillard, Marco Giovenale, Ellen Baxt, Cara Benson, Karla Kelsey, Eleni Sikelianos, Ivan Arguelles, Raúl Zurita, Keith Tuma & jUStin!katKO, Paul Legault, Lisa Lubasch, Del Ray Cross, CAConrad, Jehanne Dubrow, Angela Genusa. Peter Ganick, Lars Palm, Mark Young, Steve Carey, Nathan Logan, Maggie Nelson, Oliver de la Paz, Catherine Ming, Cole Swensen, Joanne Kyger, Rebecca Foust, Deborah Bernhardt, Brenda Coultas, Amy Beeder, Luis Cernuda, Luis Alberto Ambroggio, and Brooklyn Copeland.

If you want me to consider your book, just e-mail me for my address to send a review copy.

The Daily Glance

Frederick Williams' Poets of Brazil/Poetas do Brazil is an anthology of Brazilian poetry from its beginnings to now. Because of its nature, I was predisposed to like it, for I'm very interested in Brazilian literature, and the few anthologies of Brazilian poetry available in English tend to focus on periods. This anthology definitely added to my knowledge of Brazilian poetry prior to the twentieth-century. In it I encountered many poets, especially from the colonial period, I did not know. It also includes some greats of the twentieth-century, like Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Augusto de Campos, and I enjoyed getting to know a little more about Ferreira Gullar, whose poems in this anthology are fabulous. Of course, as with an anthology, many poets were missing that I would have liked to see included (I was especially sad not to see Leminski's work**), but that is part of the nature of anthologies. Williams' introduction was interesting, though I would have liked to see it much longer. The complexities of Brazilian poetry are not well-known in the U.S., so I appreciate seeing any explanatory material on it. Ultimately, this book makes a nice shelf companion to Bishop's anthology and Nothing the Sun could not Explain.



**Brazilian translators--please translate a selected works of Leminski's poetry in English. There's one in Spanish, and there are pieces of his scattered in multiple books.

Labels: Daily Glance

The Daily Glance

Oliver de la Paz's Requiem for the Orchard is essentially three things in one. It deals with de la Paz's memories of his youth, it laments the passing of his youth's places, and it tries to negotiate a space for his son to have similar memories. The poems are clear and full of American childhoods. The titles alone tell much about the book: "Self-Portrait with a Spillway," "Self-Portrait with Schlitz, a Pickup, and the Snake River," and "In Defense of Small Towns." Change the beer type and the river name, and I'm right there on the banks. Ah, America's places and the desire to leave those places and look back in longing--De la Paz expresses this urge well, and because of the strength of his poetic voice, he makes these personal memories seem like something most people can understand.

I was irreverent in my youth. Not a hair of mine
was trained on words I said. At the first red flare,

I'd hurl curses. There were bees spiraling out of me.
Sometimes I wanted to gather them in the playground

with my bare hands, I thought, much like guiding water
into a plastic bag.

Labels: Daily Glance

The Daily Glance

Cole Swensen's poetry appears in the book Flare alongside of Thomas Nozkowski's images. Swensen's poems cover a variety of themes, but they center around the act of a solar flare. Other images/ideas repeat, such as earth images, animal images, the heart, and falling. With no titles, the book could be read as consisting of either many poems or one long one. I read it as a long one, but an interesting reading could be made of pieces on individual pages.

the sun alone
claiming 99% of the total mass of our solar system and as perfect sphere as you're likely to get
the twist of an ancient
arcade as it's aching
the oracular offer
of a blind port
on a winded point
upending
the after
a death
is a small thing
until it's not over.

The short lines of this selection are more typical of the book than the one long line. Swensen's lines tend to be short and meditative, and she gently shifts her topics as she spirals through the poems. Also, interestingly, these pieces seem personal although Swensen avoids the first person (not completely, but mostly) throughout the book, focusing more on the second and third person. I wonder how that connects to Swensen's practice of ekphrastic poetry and whether the poems or images came first.

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life, once again, has been impeding the daily glance project.

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Catherine Meng's Tonight's the Night caught me off guard mostly because it was published in 2007, and I've heard little about it. It's a fabulous book complete with a bibliography, discography, and notes--which come before the text. The text consists of poems with a single title, "Tonight's the Night," which cover a variety of themes but repeat phrases and ideas throughout. Since she plays with music in the poems, this repetition seems to relate to musical practices.

The last & tallest gable hit by sun

holds one slender window drawn

so what is real as the day is long is no longer

than the length of this room.

Meng takes a line from Neil Young's "Tonight's the Night" and places it in another context where it becomes enriched by the surrounding lines. Ultimately, the repetition of phrases in the book makes it seem like there is a larger meaning to be found in the book (and perhaps among the connections of the arts) if one really searches.

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Difficult Beauty is a selected bilingual book of work by Luis Alberto Ambroggio edited by Yvetter Neisser Moreno. Not knowing this Argentine poet's work before now, I find the book useful as an introduction to his work, though I admit that I wish the actual introduction to the book said a little more about his life. Still, the poetry speaks for itself with an easy grace aware of its fragility.

The economy of forgetting is always startling!

A tiny grain of sand
in the eternal murmur of the ocean.

A single shout.

_________

¡Asombrosa siempre la economía del olvido!

Un grano mínimo de arena
en el eterno murmullo del océano.

Un solo grito

He is talking about how very few poets remain in time, so that perhaps only one will remain for our time, but his choice of language here tells what he thinks the poet does. Our task is to shout/cry/scream our presence in the forgetting space which is the universe. Though he quotes Huidobro several times, I sense the influence of Neruda in his work, especially in his poetics.**



**This book stresses our global nature. Here we have a Argentine poet who lives in the U.S. and whose book was published in translation in Bulgaria.

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Years ago, Lorna Dee Cervantes posted the following poem in my comment stream. I have a printed copy taped to my office wall, for I think it is a beautiful poem, no matter whose name is in the title.


Poem For Bill; Or, How To Be Comfortable In Your Own Skin

Peel it off. Take a breath.
Breathe in a world — united
and immaculently expanded.
Hop on a hophead universe.
Be there in a whirl. To dance
is only to sing, a shower
of daisies plucking you up from
the grave. Be there in the flowers,
the grave reasons nature gives
flight, the inevitable crawl to-
ward the knowledge of the soul —
that peanut, gallery of deception
and redemption — in a blink. Take off
the sail. Trust the drift. The lull,
the dull sheet of rink the sea
becomes before the gale, la bonanza
in a horizon — the crossing. Be there
instantly. In an instant, rich
for thhe sight, the bling bling
of autumn over the ear, the fine
brush of snow over the kiss. Fish
coming easy to the net and out.
Hold it in, but only to the rush
of release. And see. See? Sea
in the dark: comfortable
in its own skin.

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Deborah Bernhardt's echolalia is a book that uses many contemporary experimental techniques to talk essentially about relationships. It's not that she has only that topic. Actually, she talks about quite a few different topics, from past literary figures (Dickinson, Whitman, etc. . .) to language itself; plus, some of the text seems to work from just getting us to look at what it is doing.

Note: This is an array formula and must be entered by pressing
CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER
+word +word +word.

Familiar yes, but how does it fit in the poem? Many bits of this book make one ask such questions, but for me, that makes reading the book interesting. Things seem like they do fit together but not always in an obvious way.

and a nose becomes a bird. It doesn't seem to mind. This isn't real. There's no
flying.
There's a kind of hush all over the world. The whoosh of a sneeze is a cluster
of feathers

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Rebecca Foust's Mom's Canoe is quite different from the other books that I've read lately. The forms are orderly with crisp stanzas standing out on the page, and the poems are narratives, telling personal stories that are both clear and set in a certain place, the Alleghenies. They have a nature feel, but the world they describe is one where people work hard if they can find work and just try to get by.


His cottage down in the Cove
--mildew and wild roses,
thick vines choking


everything, outhouse,
grid bridge over sludge,
what once was a river.


It's a short but enjoyable read and perhaps is the only poetry book that I know dealing with the Alleghenies.

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The Selected Poems of Steve Carey edited by Edmund Berrigan is my introduction to Carey's work. It is firmly situated in the crowd stretching from Notley to Whalen. In fact, both of these poets are mentioned in the work. It also reminds me some of the elder Berrigan's work. It reads easily, as though an overheard conversation by someone who is different. While there are many pieces to enjoy, my favorite is a simple piece about being surrounded by snow and loving friends.

Six in the morning, outside
Blowing snow in the perfect dark, 22.
I'm awake after awakening dreams
(Often happens just before dawn)
Marion and Joe abed asleep
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Get some coffee going
Come out here in skivvies to write this
Loving them both so in a norther town

Profound? Not really, but human and accessible, yes. I'm glad to have come across this book since it shines light on a poet who passed away too young.

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Nathan Logan's Dick is an e-chapbook that centers around variations of the word dick--the name, a way of acting, etc. . . . The titles sound like something from a bad porno movie: "I Love Dick," "Roommate Dick," "The Dick is Natural." The pieces are short and try to play on humor. I suppose Logan is attempting to reclaim the word or assert it in poetry while also trying to be funny and poke fun of high poetry. Ultimately, the poems are easy to read and flow well, but the use of the word dick seems too much of a trick to me. When I look for something behind the trick, I don't see it.

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Brooklyn Copeland's Northermost is a curious little ebook. The cover contains an image of an iceberg off Argentina, and Copeland makes various references to ice throughout the book, though most of it seems far north ice.

I once said, You can smell the ice

before you get to it.
Greenland, she secretes this

highly personal warning—a door
on the buoy at the pole.

Yet, the book contains images that seem to be as much about women as ice, as if she is describing different towns as different women or women as town or women as northernmost towns. It's a confusing but interesting dilemma to figure out as a reader because she also uses some sailing references, so the question becomes one of is this the "she" of the ship or the land or the compass or some real she? And ultimately, what do the she(s) have to do with the frozen places? Essentially, this is fun reading, and the work has a nice style.

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Lars Palm's for good behavior is a e-chapbook filled with prose poems. The poems play at the border of flash fiction and prose poetry, for they tell little stories that often contain history or references to cultural events. For example, "(wake up screaming)" seems to recount the basic plot of a horror film. A bunch of teens go into the woods to drink and see a man with a mask and become scared. Yet, they are somewhat relieved to find there is no face behind the mask. Palm is riffing on a standard horror plot but changing the ending. Most of these stories have an element of the unusual to them, such as the poem about the California of Russia that disappears. Ultimately, these pieces are more global than any other poetry that I've read lately. Palm jumps from his home base in the Canary Islands to Russia to Zimbabwe to Denmark to Sweden, and this book makes me think about global poetry movements fostered by the Internet. Will language traditions become more important than nations in the future?

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Sorry for a few days off. Travel, work, and food poisoning got in the way.

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Peter Ganick's News on Skis displays a range of innovative poetry in three primary sections. The first section contains shorter poems that look like traditional poems but read like experiments in sound and syntax. One of the fascinating things about these pieces for me is that they contain occasional capitalized words, and these words looked at without the rest of the poem seem to create poems on their own, so the reading experience which is already complicated by the experiments in sound grow even more complicated with a series of poems inside a series of poems. The second section contain shaped poems, but the meaning experiment continues.

will
topaz
crisis
evaders
demand a

In the book, this piece is in the shape of a half pyramid. The last section is a significant change because Ganick uses ellipses, and they create quite a different sound from the first two sections. It is also the shortest section and is titled "Epilogue." Overall, Ganick challenges our interpretative skills and ideas of what poetry is. He also pushes poetry to its limits in a way that shows the rest of us avenues of experimentation.

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Angela Genusa's The Package Insert of Sorrows is a chapbook filled with recycled language and even a recycled drug insert (in my case, for Restoril). Genusa uses langauge that at times seems pulled from web sites, and at other times, she seems to craft her lines with her own (if it is ever our own) language. So, in one piece, we get:

Fashion the whatever of amphibology from
angelina jolie ecstasy fertility ear money at
home

Other poems sound like this.

A phone was on a desk in front
of him, an ordinary old phone, and package insert
package insert tear his gaze from it, because if it rings
now... if it rings

These lines seems quite different to me, though they both play with questions concerning found langauge and if our language in general is societal rather than personal. The both also play with language as part of the coporate system. Still, as a whole the chapbook seems to be the opposite of corporate langauge, especially since it looks self-published and breaks such language apart before handing it to us.

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Jehanne Dubrow's The Hardship Post deals with many difficult questions, such as how does one talk about an event as massive as the Holocaust, especially when one is trying to negotiate one's identity in the memory space that surrounds it. Dubrow asks questions of history and of herself, and the answers that she finds are not always conforting. Her langauge, however, is consistently beautiful in this work, even when she is dealing with events that are not. She captures that contrast well in "Voyeurs," a poem which presents the wonderful lunch she has while her mother tells her about the Hutus and Tutsis, a poem which shows one looking but not really looking to act.

My favorite piece is "Rosh Hashanah," for in it she tracing her voice back to its root.

By following my voice back to its source,
I found the shofar's open mouth, a call
to men inside the belly of a fish.

She claims that behind her voice is the blowing of the shofar, and that seems to be true, especially in this collection. It is something she has found, claimed, and used as inspiration.

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My book of American poets translated into Spanish in Chile that I co-edited with Galo Ghigliotto has just been released in Chile, and it already has its first review--in one of Chile's major newspapers, El Mercurio. The book is titled La alteración del silencio: poesía norteamericana reciente. Look for the reverse version sometime in the spring, The Alteration of Silence: recent Chilean Poetry. with the University of New Orleans Press.

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CAConrad's Deviant Propulsion is a blast. It's Philadelphia shown to you as only the he can show it, full of sex (in cabs, dinners--with the city itself), commentary, love, and poetry all thrown at you with full energy.

There are thousands of Americans everyday
who are looking for a safe place to invest
their money. Poets are the best source for
removing negative charge from your wealth,
and raising the collective conscience of the
planet.

Really, this collection seems like one giant ode to Philly, with occasional side trips to places like San Francisco that still seem viewed through Philly eyes. Perhaps, though, I've grown to see the city through CAConrad (and Frank Sherlock) so much so that when I think of it, I'm thinking of a poetic myth, one that I have for few other cities. I suppose that shows how strong a pull Conrad has in his works.

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Del Ray Cross's Lub Luffly is a book of short poems filled with puns, humor, and commentary on contemporary poetry. It relies on parataxis mixed with short narrative sections for its primary punch.

a concentrated and heightened
form of language. can't i just
site here and count butterflies?
my cellphone has no reception.
this leads to a greater
construction of narrative
character development cohe
sion.

In these lines, he plays with the ideas of non-narrative poetry being too difficult, and his reference to the cell phone seems to capture our attention-lacking society. Still, what is "this" referring to in these lines? The cellphone, butterflies, or concentrated language? Are they equal? Cross seems on the fence with this question, as he asks it over and over in this collection.

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Lisa Lubasch's Twenty-One After Days is beautifully constructed and full of language exploration. In fact, thinking about the logic of language and of cognition seems to be the overriding theme of the book, and since I'm fairly interested in linguistics and the question of language systems, I found her personal exploration of the questions fascinating. Take the first poem, for example:

lampshades will admit of the spectacular -- are they hosts to other things? -- greedy narratives -- where the poem boils over -- rings on the bed, so the surrounding bets are off -- influence may also be a wander of sorts -- clandestine raveler -- these mincing ways that words go in

Is she really talking about lampshades? Is this about the internal logic of narratives? Inheritance of narratives? Or is it about the syntactical dancing of meaning as words shift contexts? I'm not sure how Lubasch would answer these questions, but her work definitely makes one think about them.

The one thing I found a little awkward in her work was her use of the prose poem. See the one above. She uses dashes to create sounds in the lines, but many of the poems in the collection look like more traditional free verse lyrics, and these feel like them as well, with the dash just functioning essentially as a line break. I'm not trying to be critical of her form choice with these, for the pieces, at least for me, read much the same as the other poems in the book. I just wonder why she picked the prose form.

Having just read her excellent translation of Paul Eluard (Green Integer), I was happy to read through some of her personal pieces, and I found that the pieces pulled me largely due to the sounds of the lines.

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Paul Legault's The Madeleine Poems are poems that center around a character named Madeleine. All of the poems have titles related to her: "Madeleine as Travelogue," "Madeleine as the New Frontier," "Madeleine as Forest Gospel," "Madeleine as Supply." Still, even having read an entire book by/about Madeleine, I'm not sure that I can describe who Madeleine is. She seems to be a shifting figure used to represent various aspect of contemporary life. Even more, she becomes a figure that allows us to explore gender and the way that it is constructed, and in some ways she seems like a stand-in for Legault.

All the early distances are buried

distances, all the early
systems were systems

of measurement, what use
have we, for what we have

he is a list of our weekly duties,
and one must learn to live negligent

These poems are delicate and finely crafted. They tie to each other through Madeleine, but they focus us on individual ideas/experiences through being short lyrics. They work well for pieces in a first collection and leave me wondering what Legault's future direction will be.

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Keith Tuma & jUStin!katKO's Holiday in Tikrit is a chapbook intended to wake us up from the slumber of continual war. As you might guess from the title, it's an anti-war rant full of energy and pictures.

we renamed the nations and turned off the magnets
we subverted cell-phone towers and ransacked the cabinets
we rediscovered electricity and prepared to evaporate
we researched the best way to hotwire a Hummer

The writers here seem more like guerrilla soldiers than traditional poets, and I like to read the reactions of U.S. poets to the actual events of our times. U.S. poets too often stray from actual political poetry. That said, I would like to know how their collaboration worked. Who wrote what? Do they still remember? Did the collaborative project help them create all the energy that gets wrapped up in this short chapbook? As a short epic, how did they manage to craft the narrator of the collective?

Additionally, I like how they play with form in this work. The chapbook is one long poem with the "dirty" words covered with black boxes. Are they suggesting that the process of the war is being covered up. Are the black boxes black boxes? They seem to be telling off the system of covering over by using the black boxes for the harshest language they have.

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Raúl Zurita's Purgatory is one of the best books written in the latter half of the twentieth century. I don't usually make that type of claim, but this book is fabulous, and I'm very happy that Anna Deeny through her translation made it available in English. Beyond the poetry, this translation includes a preface by Zurita in which he explains some aspects of the book:

I lived seventeen years under Pinochet's dictatorship, and imagining these poems occupying landscapes was my intimate form of resistance, of not giving up, of not dying in the midst of abuse and confinement. When face with the horror, we had to respond with art that was stronger and more vast that the pain and damage inflicted upon us. . . . None of the poetic forms I knew, nothing, could help me express this.

Like Parra and Neruda before him, Zurita is using poetry to defend the individual, and like them, he searches for a form in this book and picks up the epic spirit of Dante transformed through Chile's hell of Pinochet to express himself, to express the violence perpetuated upon Chileans. He plays with form quite a bit to express himself, and the results are staggering.

I smashed my sickening face
in the mirror
I love you--I said--I love you

I love you more than anything in the world.

--

Destrocé mi cara tremenda
frente al espejo

tea mo—mi dije—te amo
Te amo a más que nada en el mundo

It is hard to get the feel for this work from a few lines because it has an overwhelming force as a whole. Here is a poet responding to horrific events (which, ironically, started with the coup on 9/11/1973) to keep us individual and human.

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when, the right size of ink the shape of an ethereal,
hollowed insides of the book about legends, the
mythographer blinded in either eye by beauty’s ephemeral
gloss, hod carriers and shun the right thing, to pretend
to be other, while looking straight at “her” knowing the
train is headed for the same destination, hod carriers
ponder, each window becomes a luminous planet rushing
toward destruction, speeding thoughts an end to the
ticket, bearing no known to a previous resemblance, and
sing song shifts her skirts into tight abyss, I am
alone, then, register yellow on the frame, hello hello,
thought the phone was off the hook

The conversation here appears to be less with the reader than within the poet, and we are just privileged to listen in (is this Mill's overheard voice in a piece that constructs/deconstructs self?). I've liked Arguelles' work since I published it in Moria back in 1999, and this book just cements my notion that he's an important poet.

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Perceptible black, perceptible blue that the world contains
If you want to see the lights of a town go down
go to New York. If you want to see smoking holes and buildings bristling
out of Baghdad's back take a train to Brooklyn.

You were born
& now you've torn our nights
to shreds & watch the minutes tumble inconsequential but
of consequent is every second
your supersize ears grow
away from you bumping.

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I know that you, my dear readers (all three of you), are probably in withdrawal because of my brief hiatus from the Daily Glance project. I'm in the middle of a move, so when it is done, I'll be back to my daily brief comments on books project, and I'm excited to get back to it because I have some good books waiting for a read. (If you want to add your own, just send me an e-mail message.)

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Cara Benson's (made) is a poetry book that seems to be in motion, and by that I mean that the poems seem to be collecting various images along the way around the country. It's as if this book is about collecting the fragmented things of the U.S--not really ideas as much as things. The mostly prose poems seem to blend into each other because there are words that are in a larger font. These at first seem like titles listed below the poems, but they occasionally appear on pages without other text, and the poems occasionally appear without them, so they seem more like elements intended to tie the text together. Still, the book seems to work as a collector of things: washers, dryers, leaves, bumper cars, ping pong, apples, roads, tires, milk bottles, kettles, sweaters. She mentions the "cross-country mile," and that's what seems to be happening in this book.

Rusted shackles drape from a nail in the white plaster wall of garage no. 1. What use they have exerted; now, all these years past, refuted. Tethered to an idea, the long-distance runner will forge into body spasms, permanent condition. The garage houses dated babysauce jars of odd screws and mismatched butterfly hooks.

Ultimately, the collected fragments/things add up and suggest a dismal or perhaps just downtrodden world. This world feels like the Rust Belt stretched across the rest of the country. That said, the book is interesting to read and feels like the beginning of a much larger project.

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Ellen Baxt's Analfabeto/An Alphabet is a book with roots in the U.S. and Brazil. In fact, it reads like the daily experience of an American in Brazil trying to negotiate different customs and sharing cultural differences with local people. Relationships forming, sexuality being explored, and typical Brazilian life work into the poems. Some Portuguese drifts in as well, from the untranslatable saudade to counting um dois tres. I like how she explains cultural translation along with trying to translate actual words.

On Rua General Gois Monteiro, I don't want to look at the dead
bird on the sidewalk but I do anyway. I couldn't explain the
difference between Look at and See, so I said they were the same.
How can you ovulate on the right and shed on the left?

Ultimately, I don't know if I like this book for transcribing her life in transition between cultures or because I am fascinated by Brazil (and think we should be having more poetic mixing with the Brazilians).

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Marco Giovenale's CDK is an e-book about decay, disease, and degeneration back to simple forms, and the e-book itself is deceptively simple, for each section/poem is labeled "1." Are these separate poems? Are they part of one longer poem that is the e-book itself? Are they alternate versions of the same poem? Bascially, is Giovenale writing and rewriting the same degeneration through a variety of perspectives? The decay seems to alternate from scientic description to daily reaction on other things, like skin, rabbits, fruit, and land. Also, the poems are in English with occasional French thrown in as though our langauge is breaking down as part of the process.

1

it symbolizes also a compassionate person

1

shrieking is everything. have eyes. the awful "o" before before fences.

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Another day off.

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Donora Hillard's Theology of the Body uses religious figures' words and her own to discuss the attempt to control women's bodies in some Catholic groups (really it could be expanded to Christan). The central motivation for the book seems to be events that Hillard has experienced herself, such as an experience of being chided as a teacher at a Catholic school.

Areas to be addressed for the retention of the instructor:
1. Students should remain quiet.
2. Students should stand to particiapte in the Pledge of Allegiance.
. . . . . . .
6. Be mindful of professional dress. Cover tattoos, scars.
7. Topics such as one's future plans should be kept to oneself.

In this case, the primary control of the female comes through controlling her as a teacher, though the mindset of control definetly spills out in discussing controlling students.

There are parts of the book where the theme seems to recede before the beauty of the language.

The heft of wet
clothing, catch of lint

in a trap. It's the first
season without him in

the house

The words here are quite simple, but the line breaks give them added interest and a nice sound. ***



***This book was published by Gold Wake Press, a press that I do not know. I might forget that, except that while looknig at this book today, I received a note from Nicholas Ravnikar, a poet I admire, that his next book is coming out with Gold Wake. Definetly then a press to explore.

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Ange Mlinko's Shoulder Season explores the difference in the mind's "little spa" (the created interior world of the imagination) and the destruction, both financial and physical, that surrounds us. Moreover, Mlinko is great at taking us in one direction and then shifting speeds so that it seems like we know what she is talking about in language that is familiar when we do not.

A single taste bud magnified resembles an orchid
but what that one's drinking from is a woman's eye

which must be brinelss. I wonder what she consumes
that her tears taste like fructose. For minutes she's all that its.

These lines use familiar language, and I think I can go somewhere with them, but then again, I'm not sure. Mlinko's turning of a simple phrase like "she's all that is" to "she's all that its" really complicates the interpretation process. Beyond the intimate level interpretative quandaries, I like that Mlinko's work reads like an active response to what is happening now.

In the weeks after the catastrophe
I reported to work only to brood at my cubicle
and feel the trembling of the river
like a Rubicon.

Typically, it might bother me that a poem like this one is not more specific. What catastrophe? What company? What river? But in this poem the abstraction seems appropriate because it is part of the cubicle culture. The "I" disappears into abstraction in the cubicle.

Before reading this book, I only knew Mlinko's work through her brilliant critical works, but now that I have read this one, I know that her poetry is just as good as her criticism. If you are interested in more about this book, you should head over to the interview with her here.

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Dan Beachy-Quick's This Nest, Swift Passerine is fascinating for the form alone, but more, the content is like a mix of poetry, commentary, science, and more. It's as if he's meditating on influence but also is responding to texts, so, for example, he includes passages of Dorothy Wordsworth's journal, and he writes to her and her topics seem to filter into other parts of the text. As for the form, the entire book is one poem broken down into sections, and, in general, the form is open. He includes things like lists and the points of the compass, and in quick succession the form will go from square stanzas to words thrown around the page.

Born into the order of words
(point at a tree the mother says, Tree
(pointing still mother says, Branch
(and still, seeing now what the child sees, Nest)

Nest the word echoes
Through centuries my mouth This Nest

Alive with words not spoken by me
Which I repeat back, repeat back

In the world to make my meaning heard.

These lines seem like a good description for this rich book, a book too rich for me to say much about in this brief glance. I look forward to going back through it slowly and enjoying the many voices that play in the lines.

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