"Romey's Order" is an indelible sequence of poems voiced by an invented (and inventive) boy-speaker called Romey, set alongside a river in the South Carolina lowcountry.
As the word-furious eye and voice of these poems, Romey urgently records--and tries to order--the objects, inscape, injuries, and idiom of his "blood-home" and childhood world. Sounding out the nerves and nodes of language to transform "every burn-mark and blemish," to bind our river-wrack and leavings," Romey seeks to forge finally (if even for a moment) a chord in which he might live. Intently visceral, aural, oral,...
"Romey's Order" is an indelible sequence of poems voiced by an invented (and inventive) boy-speaker called Romey, set alongside a river in the Sout...
The Key to the City brings together work that has long been admired by readers of literary magazines and quarterlies. The collection opens with "The Ruins," a group of poems set in poor neighborhoods in New York City--some so cut off from midtown that they seem part of another continent or another age. The people in these poems are schoolgirls, a cleaning lady in the laundromat, derelicts, a prostitute stabbed in the street. Their interwoven voices contribute to a complex, grave vision of remote causes and immediate suffering in the city. The poems of the second section explore a broad...
The Key to the City brings together work that has long been admired by readers of literary magazines and quarterlies. The collection opens with...
A new inclusiveness, a heady freedom, grounded in the facts of mortality, inform Gail Mazur s recent poems, as if making them has served as both a bunker and a promontory, a way to survive, and to be exposed to, the profound underlying subject of this book: a husband s approaching death. The intimate particulars of a shared life are seen from a great height and then there s the underlife of the bunker: endurance, holding on, life as uncompromising reality. This new work, possessed by the unique devil-may-care intensity of someone writing at the end of her nerves, makes "Figures in a...
A new inclusiveness, a heady freedom, grounded in the facts of mortality, inform Gail Mazur s recent poems, as if making them has served as both a ...
In the hands of Bruce Smith, devotions are momentary stops to listen to the motor of history. They are meditations and provocations. They are messages received from the chatter of the street and from transmissions as distant as Memphis and al-Mansur. Bulletins and interruptions come from brutal elsewheres and from the interior where music puts electrodes on the body to take an EKG. These poems visit high schools, laundromats, motels, films, and dreams in order to measure the American hunger and thirst. They are interested in the things we profess to hold most dear as well as what's...
In the hands of Bruce Smith, devotions are momentary stops to listen to the motor of history. They are meditations and provocations. They are messa...
In his first book of poems since his highly acclaimed "June-tree," Peter Balakian continues to define himself as one of the most distinctive voices of his generation. Exploring history, self, and imagination, as well as his ongoing concerns with catastrophe and trauma, many of Balakian s new poems wrestle with the aftermath and reverberations of 9/11. Whether reliving the building of the World Trade Towers in the inventive forty-three-section poem that anchors the book, walking the ruins of the Bosnian National Library in Sarajevo, meditating on Andy Warhol s silk screens, or considering...
In his first book of poems since his highly acclaimed "June-tree," Peter Balakian continues to define himself as one of the most distinctive voices...
Jennifer Clarvoe s second book, "Counter-Amores," wrestles with and against love. The poems in the title series talk back to Ovid s "Amores," and, in talking back, take charge, take delight, and take revenge. They suggest that we discover what we love by fighting, by bringing our angry, hungry, imperfect selves into the battle. Like a man who shouts for the echo back from a cliff, or the scientist who teaches her parrot to say, I love you, or the philosopher who wonders what it is like to be a bat, or Temple Grandin s lucid imaginings of the last moments of cattle destined for slaughter,...
Jennifer Clarvoe s second book, "Counter-Amores," wrestles with and against love. The poems in the title series talk back to Ovid s "Amores," and, ...
A meditation on the nature of betrayal, the constraints of identity, and the power of narrative, the lyric monologues in "Troy, Unincorporated" offer a retelling, or refraction, of Chaucer s tragedy "Troilus and Criseyde." The tale s unrooted characters now find themselves adrift in the industrialized farmlands, strip malls, and half-tenanted historic downtowns of south-central Wisconsin, including the real, and literally unincorporated, town of Troy. Allusive and often humorous, they retain an affinity with Chaucer, especially in terms of their roles: Troilus, the good courtly lover,...
A meditation on the nature of betrayal, the constraints of identity, and the power of narrative, the lyric monologues in "Troy, Unincorporated" off...
"Raptor," the secondbook by the author of the widely praised "Citizen," is a collection of formal poems and measured free verse unified by its investigation of our ancient poetic, mythic, and scientific fascination with birds of prey: hawks, eagles, owls, vultures, and falcons. Drawing extensively on his own experience working at a raptor rehabilitation center, along with a variety of sources ranging from medieval texts on falconry to the latest conservation studies of raptor anatomy and habitat, Andrew Feld shows these killing birds to be mirrors for humanity, as indicator species, and as...
"Raptor," the secondbook by the author of the widely praised "Citizen," is a collection of formal poems and measured free verse unified by its inve...
A collection intent on worrying the boundaries between natural and unnatural, human and not, Unlikely Designs draws far-ranging source material from the back channels of knowledge-making: the talk pages of Wikipedia, the personal writings of Charles Darwin, the love advice doled out by chatbots, and the eclectic inclusions on the Golden Record time capsule. It is here we discover the allure of the index, what pleasure there is in bending it to our own devices. At the same time, these poems also remind us that logic is often reckless, held together by nothing more than syntactical short...
A collection intent on worrying the boundaries between natural and unnatural, human and not, Unlikely Designs draws far-ranging source material...
Although "Disposable Camera" is Janet Foxman s first book-length collection, one would not know it given the wry sophistication of the poems found within. The notion of the disposable camera permeates the entire book, where Foxman considers the instabilities in even our deepest attachments. Here gulfs expand, for instance, between twins, between the musician and his instrument, between the recluse and his inconsolable solitude. Whether a hermit; a twin; a filmgoer utterly taken with "Triumph of the Will"; or Masaccio, just after he s painted the "Expulsion" the poems speakers share a...
Although "Disposable Camera" is Janet Foxman s first book-length collection, one would not know it given the wry sophistication of the poems found ...
