In his sixth collection, Mark Halliday continues to seek ways of using the smart playfulness of such poets as Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch to explore life's emotional mysteries--both dire and hilarious--from the perpetual dissolving of our past to the perpetual frustration of our cravings for ego-triumph, for sublime connection with an erotically idealized Other, and for peace of spirit. Animated by belief in the possible truths to be reached in interpersonal speech, Halliday's voice-driven poetry wants to find insight--or at least a stay against confusion--through personality without...
In his sixth collection, Mark Halliday continues to seek ways of using the smart playfulness of such poets as Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch to explore...
In "El Dorado," Peter Campion explores what it feels like to live in America right now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Splicing cell-phone chatter with translations of ancient poems, jump-cutting from traditional to invented forms, and turning his high-res lens on everything from box stores to trout streams to airport lounges, Campion renders both personal and collective experience with capacious and subtle skill.
In "El Dorado," Peter Campion explores what it feels like to live in America right now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Splicing cell-ph...
"Hollywood & God" is a virtuosic performance, filled with crossings back and forth from cinematic chiaroscuro to a kind of unsettling desperation and disturbing even lurid hallucination. From the "Baltimore Catechism" to the great noir films of the last century to today s Elvis impersonators and Paris Hilton (an impersonator of a different sort), Robert Polito tracks the snares, abrasions, and hijinks of personal identities in our society of the spectacle, a place where who we say we are, and who (we think) we think we are fade in and out of consciousness, like flickers of light dancing...
"Hollywood & God" is a virtuosic performance, filled with crossings back and forth from cinematic chiaroscuro to a kind of unsettling desperation a...
Are we alone? If so, "Particle and Wave" insists that we need not be lonely. Here the periodic table of elementsa system familiar to many of us from high school chemistryunfolds in a series of unexpected meanings with connotations public, personal, and existential. Based on a logic that considers the atomic symbol an improvised phoneme, "Particle and Wave" is keenly attuned to the qualities of voice and concerned with how these improvisations fall on the listening ear. From the most recent housing bust, to the artistic visions of Christo and Jeanne Claude, to the labors of the Curies, to...
Are we alone? If so, "Particle and Wave" insists that we need not be lonely. Here the periodic table of elementsa system familiar to many of us from h...
Reel to Reel, Alan Shapiro's twelfth collection of poetry, moves outward from the intimate spaces of family and romantic life to embrace not only the human realm of politics and culture but also the natural world, and even the outer spaces of the cosmos itself. In language richly nuanced yet accessible, these poems inhabit and explore fundamental questions of existence, such as time, mortality, consciousness, and matter. How did we get here? Why is there something rather than nothing? How do we live fully and lovingly as conscious creatures in an unconscious universe with no ultimate...
Reel to Reel, Alan Shapiro's twelfth collection of poetry, moves outward from the intimate spaces of family and romantic life to embrace not on...
Shadow of a Cloud but No Cloud, the latest collection from enigmatic prose poet Killarney Clary, is a book-length sequence of unnumbered, untitled poems, each evoking a clear moment in time. The details on which Clary chooses to focus suggest a narrative that will not resolve. The unnamed people with whom she interacts offer exchanges she is desperate to prolong, and in attempts to understand her place, she reaches beneath the fragile armor of those loved, especially those who can no longer answer her. This quietly haunting book, remarkable for its subtlety and delicacy, is Clary's...
Shadow of a Cloud but No Cloud, the latest collection from enigmatic prose poet Killarney Clary, is a book-length sequence of unnumbered, untit...
Milton's God Where I-95 meets The Pike, a ponderous thunderhead flowered- stewed a minute, then flipped like a flash card, tattered edges crinkling in, linings so dark with excessive bright that, standing, waiting, at the overpass edge, the onlooker couldn't decide until the end, or even then, what was revealed and what had been hidden.
Using a variety of forms and achieving a range of musical effects, Nate Klug's Anyone traces the unraveling of astonishment upon small scenes-natural and domestic, political...
Milton's God Where I-95 meets The Pike, a ponderous thunderhead flowered- stewed a minute, then flipped like a flash card, ta...
from "Ozone Journal" Bach's cantata in B-flat minor in the cassette, we lounged under the greenhouse-sky, the UVBs hacking at the acids and oxides and then I could hear the difference between an oboe and a bassoon at the river's edge under cover-- trees breathed in our respiration; there was something on the other side of the river, something both of us were itching toward-- radical bonds were broken, history became science. We were never the same. The title poem of Peter Balakian's Ozone Journal is a sequence of fifty-four...
from "Ozone Journal" Bach's cantata in B-flat minor in the cassette, we lounged under the greenhouse-sky, the UVBs hacking at the...
This World and That One Sometimes you defy it, I am not that, watching a stranger cry like a dog when she thinks she's alone at the kitchen window, hands forgotten under the running tap. The curtains blow out, flap the other side of the sill. In you one hole fills another, stacked like cups. You remember your hands. Connie Voisine's third book of poems centers on the border between the United States and Mexico, celebrating the stunning, severe desert landscape found there. This setting marks the occasion as well for Voisine to explore...
This World and That One Sometimes you defy it, I am not that, watching a stranger cry like a dog when she thinks she's alo...
MidsummerCambridge, MA, 2008 Midsummer. Finally, you are used to disappointment. A baby touches phlox. Many failures, many botched attempts, A little success in unexpected forms. This is how the rest will go: The gravel raked, bricks ashen, bees fattened-honey not for babes. All at once, a rustling, whole trees in shudder, clouds pulled Westward. You are neither here nor there, neither right nor Wrong. The world is indifferent, tired of your insistence. Garter snakes swallow frogs. The earthworms coil. On your fingers, the residue...
MidsummerCambridge, MA, 2008 Midsummer. Finally, you are used to disappointment. A baby touches phlox. Many failures, man...