Third Factory/Notes to Poetry

Sherwin Bitsui | Flood Song | Copper Canyon | 2010

For anyone who identifies with the land of the American West—all that good Western dust lightly held on our altoplano—this book will sit in your hands as a familiar. Yet buried in all that familiarity coil the edges of violence, abrupt encounters with spirit-world, wild-life, thunder, flash floods. Something close to surrealist imagery occurs here—but not the surrealism of old Europe’s super-charge dream-state. Here it erupts in fragmented visions of deserts, buttes, asphalt baked cities, ravens, long sun-blistered highways. If I read the book rightly, this is the account of an archaic singer’s vision of present day Navajo life. Bitsui’s ear is terrific, and just enough Navajo words occur to send the conscientious reader to a Diné lexicon.

Leslie Scalapino | Day Ocean State of Stars’ Night | Green Integer | 2007

Sometimes I feel alone in my generation, in how much I read Leslie Scalapino’s poetry. Maybe I can’t separate out her writing from the generosity she showed so many of us younger writers and friends over the decades, publishing work in O Books, meticulously responding to letters—hers a dark shy generosity. We will miss her. Of the many titles of Leslie’s on my shelf, I’ll select this as it contains “It’s go in quiet illumined grassland,” one of her most incantatory Buddhist-inflected poems, and the haunting Gulf War Noh play “Can’t is Night.” In fact this fall I will use “Can’t is Night” alongside some Fenellosa-Pound Noh plays with my Naropa kids—we’ll act them out at the local Buddha hall Zen center yurt.

Joanne Kyger | About Now: Collected Poems | NPF | 2007

This is how books used to be made. Bring together a fine poet, pair her with one of the subtlest book designers out there, and construct a book that weighs in your hands like an artifact meant to serve you a whole lifetime. Joanne Kyger’s work: humor, concision, ecological savvy, political alertness, the tempered eye of the naturalist. So many small press titles that run through the years, helping us all ‘live lightly on the earth’; finally collected here, each poem laid with a comparable lightness on the page by JB Bryan.

Paul Moss, edited, translated by Andrew Cowell & Alonzo Moss, Sr. | Hinóno’éínoo3ítoono: Arapaho Historical Traditions | U of Manitoba P | 2005

What good tales, of the recent historical past, occurring in the region given the Arapaho by the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1851): between the Platte and the Arkansas Rivers, from the Continental Divide into Kansas. Not old-time myths, but events that happened in somebody’s memory. Captivity tales, visions, coyote helpers, the Medicine Wheel. Bi-lingual, with a good account of Arapaho grammar, and a careful glossary of notable words. The translators’ use of Arapaho narrative devices to discern line-break and stanza makes this a contribution to Ethnopoetic practice.

Robert Bringhurst | A Story Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World | Nebraska | 1999

Most exciting book I read last year. Even my first and second year college students couldn’t put down the volume, which weighs in at 527 pages. The fullest account of the Boasian project in “salvage ethnography,” with a cast of characters a novelist couldn’t invent. Also a detailed, and not at all abstract look at oral literature. Accounts of how the singers proceed, how they reshape tradition to deal with smallpox, rip-offs, hunger, even anthropologists with pencils. Bringhurst knows his languages, knows natural history, the twists & turns of ethnography. Even the footnotes ring with discovery.

Diane Glancy | The Cold and Hunger Dance | Nebraska | 1998

A haunted book. Most of its pieces sit on the edge between essay, poetry, translation, and memoir. It looks easy but I bet it’s not. There’s a whiff of sage and other herbs, bitter, medicinal, sweet, nauseating—between Sun Dance and Bible, Cherokee heritage, Christian faith. Lots and lots of driving by night thunderstorm across the Great Plains.

Thomas A Clark | of Woods & Water | Moschatel | 2008

Good to remember how poetry’s power also comes from the unspectacular, the subtle, the brief rhythms, the filtered sunlight through soft leaves. Green solace in a technology-mad world. Poems so light it seems the poet’s hand scarcely perturbs language at all.

Jerome Rothenberg | Poetics & Polemics 1980-2005 | Alabama | 2008

The talks here—especially those on Ethnopoetics, poetry & the sacred, and so forth—remind me why so many of us set out on this troubled, wonderful path in the first place.

Dale Pendell | Walking with Nobby: Conversations with Norman O. Brown | Mercury House | 2008

Five conversations with Norman O. Brown. Each in the form of a walk—which Pendell took with Nobby in those last years before Brown’s Alzheimer’s silenced him. For those of us who cut our teeth on Love’s Body’s subtle, visionary politics, its aphoristic wildness, and its dance at the edge of poetics, here is the late book he never got around to writing. I knew Brown, and these reconstructed conversations provide the cadences of his speech, plus his greatest trait: never to settle for easy ways out, no matter how painful clear seeing might be. Pendell wrote these talks up afterwards from memory, they are not the result of tape recording. How did he do it?

Salim Ali | Indian Hill Birds | Oxford | 1949

Tiny volume, maybe the best writing I’ve encountered in a field guide. Salim Ali (1896-1987) was the doyen of ornithology in India. A terrifically literary man, an exemplar of the India that emerged after Independence under the guidance of Nehru: resolutely secular, democratic, confident in both art and science, proud of its culture, far away from North America. Of Salim Ali’s many field guides for birds, his natural history essays, and the autobiographical writings, I choose this title because of its concision, its sumptuous illustrations by G.M. Henry, and the precise use of terminology. Of the common myna he writes: “The nest is a collection of twigs, roots, paper and miscellaneous rubbish placed in holes in trees. Large nesting colonies occupy weep-holes in revetments alongside the hill roads in the Himalaya….”

Ron Silliman | The Alphabet | Alabama | 2008

Rather daunting to have this enormous TOME, but all those separate books on the shelf don’t get you the full poem. It’s the architecture of the sections that intrigues me at present, a lot like the attention to architecture you find through Pound’s CANTOS. And the cumulative emotion that develops within each section, sentence heaped on sentence. Many of the individual volumes have such independent spirit—Paradise, What, ABC, and so on. Now you can see how the various sections fit into the larger whole (itself part of a yet larger whole)…. I hope I finish reading this before UNIVERSE appears.

More Andrew Schelling here. Back to directory.

Julie Carr | Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines | Coffee House

Beyond beautiful—a hymn of sorrow and joy and Carr’s most intimate and powerful work yet—deeply touching, and miraculously alive in its invention.

James Belflower | Commuter | Instance

The severe angularity and audacity of postmodernity. Now, would somebody please publish “Friends of Mies van der Rohe” already?

Norma Cole | Where Shadows Will | City Lights

Norma Cole’s work is continually alert to the tiniest nuances and to the possibility for the vastness of inside that moment. The actual turns of thought, a deep thinking into language as event and the world as it seen and felt and registered continually. Objects are not merely named, but multiply-mediated. What calls our attention is seeing: and seeing into and through language. The poem never a comment, but an invitation to become enmeshed with its event; neither reductive nor overpowering, but alive to complexity.

Anne Carson | NOX | New Directions

Elegy as etymology, as colportage. But is the whole less than the sum of its scattered parts?

Ingeborg Bachman, trans. Peter Filkins | Songs in Flight | Marsilio

So I gather the salt
when the sea overcomes us,
and turn back
and lay it on the threshold
and step into the house.

We share bread with the rain;
bread, debt, and a house.

Leslie Scalapino | Considering How Exaggerated Music Is | North Point

What would you glean
mean

the long go-away-from-it plan
at hazard, sheer glass over
water

and the eking out
of syllables

ten cents-a-dozen
no rhymes

///

It would be occasion, return of the others from their something not right
I know, I could see them, moving down the aisle, that there should be
this music

This was the time when the dying brought in their wounded

///

The stippled
branch
of light
tips forward

ghosted
with pollen

and the promises of dust
stare back at us

give evidence of our having lived
the wrong questions
right

Ken Irby | The Intent On | North Atlantic

And for the dreaming, the endless
mode of occurring
as it is, as it could be, as the sleepers
keep murmuring —

for what it means
to stay alive, attuned, a moment
to this otherwise
& the sought-for, disappearing.

Of pure possibility/of the nothing
that may save it
shed of symbol, it staves off
the blighted, and so we go – into night

the blessed, the earthly
what leaks into & wrecks us
is always
never and more singular than loss

across song’s fields, folded. Inside its portals
the old book beckons and we bend
surmised of sorrow, to its rising, it turning.
What dies &

what inherits? What dissipates
and what is remnant?
If the wind is not/if the wind is here and –
its inconstancy, its minglings, its slips of

substance into light and
into beginning
for beginning is always.
Begin again.

More Patrick Pritchett here and here. His Attention Span for 2009, 2008. Back to directory.

Heather Christle | A Difficult Farm| Octopus | 2009

When, months in advance, the memory gets it right, once and for all, equipment will not wake us, and our possessions will sound more like we do.

Joy Williams| Honored Guest | Knopf | 2004

A collection of short stories about the insupportable unease of bare life and surprises like dying.

Kelly Link | Magic For Beginners | Small Beer |2005

Ghosts, zombies, cannons, ex-wives, dead and there at Disneyworld.

Zachary Schomburg | Scary, No Scary | Black Ocean | 2009

Poems suddenly planted in the waking world that update the necessary terror and steady welcomed breathlessness found in old-fashioned sublimity.

Linh Dinh | Some Kind Of Cheese Orgy | Chax |2009

We do say these things; think these things; laugh at these things; say we’re not these things that we are.

VA | Disco Prairie Social Aid And Pleasure Club | Factory Hollow | 2010

The best lines found elsewhere, now poems somewhat to themselves (144 poets).

Dorothea Lasky| Black Life |Wave | 2010

“Fear is not irony”

I was instantly shaken then hooked on this poet when I saw her read in Iowa City in 2007. Astounding mixture of head/heart.

Sawako Nakayasu| Texture Notes | Letter Machine | 2010

Poems more about what sensations do when sensations are focused on the object they carry: “The texture not of motherfucking diarrhea, but texture of / the girls, women, all ages and sizes, who have it, diarrhea / like a motherfucker.”

More Jordan Stempleman here. His Attention Span for 2007. Back to directory.

Daniel Tiffany | Infidel Poetics | Chicago | 2010

G.W. Leibniz, ed. Nicholas Rescher | Monadology | Pittsburgh | 1991

Allen Grossman | True-Love: Essays on Poetry and Valuing | Chicago | 2009

Julie Carr | 100 Notes on Violence | Ahsahta | 2010

Lucy Ives | Anamnesis | Slope | 2010

Devin Johnston | Creaturely and Other Essays | Turtle Point | 2009

Jennifer Moxley | Clampdown | Flood | 2009

David Markson | Wittgenstein’s Mistress | Dalkey Archive | 2006 (reprint)

Peter Riley | A Map of Faring | Free Verse | 2005

Jack Spicer | The Collected Poems of Jack Spicer | Black Sparrow | 1980

Lyn Hejinian | Saga/Circus | Omnidawn | 2008

More Dan Beachy-Quick here. Back to directory.

Fanny Howe | Emergence | Reality Street | 2010

Poems from the 1970s to the 90s, out of print, now republished in this graceful, quiet (or ‘hushed’ as Ashbery says on the cover), yet tough-minded collection.

James Schuyler | Other Flowers : Uncollected Poems | Farrar | 2010

More James Schuyler, found by the editors James Meetze and Simon Pettet. These poems are often uncannily intimate, casual, campy, funny, sweet and, as usual, exact and intense.

Brian Henry | Wings without Birds | Salt | 2010

The long poem ‘Where We Stand Now’ written over a period of six months as the year turned in 2002-03 is the centerpiece of this wonderful collection about the complex beauties and restrictions of domestic life—fatherhood, sex, cleaning, work, neighbours. Living and writing poetry variously, Brian Henry is diversifying.

Laurie Duggan | The Epigrams of Martial | Pressed Wafer | 2010

Marcus Valerius Martialis and Laurie Duggan know a lot about the things that detract from the vocation of poetry writing. This conveniently pocket-sized book is witty, funny, droll, wry, incisive. “As a writer of epigrams/ my royalties are minimal/ though I keep Arts Bureaucrats/ in well-paid positions./ But remember this:/ I’ll be on open access/when they’re buried in the stacks.” And “Why do you call me an old fucker?/ Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?”

Simon Leys | With Stendhal | Black Inc | 2010

Simon Leys introduces and translates into English for the first time three linked pieces: the recollections of Stendhal’s famous friend Prosper Mérimée, the impressions of novelist George Sand and a recently discovered whimsical list of the supernatural powers he wished he possessed, by Stendhal himself.

Lisa Samuels | Tomorrowland | Shearsman | 2009

A book-length poem. Lisa Samuels sustains a conceptual post-colonial premise. The poem is political, intense, serious and gives a great sense of a gradual building of mixed ideas and images as the new arrivals explore ‘Tomorrowland’. Impressive.

Justin Clemens | Villain | Hunter Contemporary Australian Poets | 2009

The book’s title is a homonym for “Villon”—François Villon, the fifteenth century French poet, thief, and vagabond who died young at 32. Whirling around many forms—villanelle, couplet, free, sonnet, experimental—the poems are melodramatic, atmospheric, sometimes hallucinatory. There are some villainous and violent thoughts and scenes—dreams and acts that include everything from a hangover to a very funny art critique. Clemens has an affinity with the mythical underworld and its darknesses and here he writes his sonnets to Orpheus.There is a kind of antic energy in Justin Clemens’ poems as they leap from the risky edge of his intellect. He dares to push boundaries. There is little elegy here – anxiety and an often ludic tone dominate sweeter thoughts.

Ken Bolton | A Whistled Bit Of Bop | Vagabond | 2010

Embracing the abstract via collage. Here are Bolton’s usual concerns—art, time, friendships, family, books, blues and jazz. And there is also ‘Australian Suburban Garden’ a meandering poem that easily extrapolates out from the view of the garden from a front porch into art, Europe and, philosophically, time.

Havi Carel | Illness : the cry of the flesh | Acumen | 2010

Philosophers have paid a lot of attention to death but rather less to illness. Yet illness is an almost universal human experience and can make us think deeply about who we are and what our relationship is to our bodies and to the world we live in.

What is illness? Is it a physiological dysfunction, a social label, or a way of experiencing the world? How do the physical, social and emotional worlds of a person change when they become ill? And can there be well-being within illness? Philosopher Havi Carel draws on the French phenomenological philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between the biological body and the lived body, as well as the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger’s ideas about existence, in order to challenge the way we understand illness

Carrie Etter, ed. | Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women Poets | Shearsman | 2010

Twenty-five experimental women poets. Includes brief poetic statements. An exciting collection of what could be called the ‘non-Mainstream’ in contemporary U.K. poetry.

Christine Wertheim, ed. | Feminaissance | Les Figues | 2010

Identity is dead. The 21st-century subject is an unstable fiction with no identifiable features or group affiliations. He’s a man without inherent qualities, a post-human ideal. But those who have long been hailed as Other exist in a different relation to this ideal. Unlike those traditionally self-possessed I’s, these Others may find themselves split between a yearning to be contemporary and unqualified, and longing for a continued allegiance to their qualitative, albeit constructed, group identity.

‘It is with an awareness of this more ambiguous and refined notion of self that ‘Feminaissance’ approaches questions of femininity and its relation to writing. Topics include: collectivity; feminine écriture; the politics of writing; text and voice; the body as a site of contestation, insurgence and pleasure; race and writing; gender as performance; writing about other women writers; economic inequities; Hélène Cixous; monstrosity; madness; and aesthetics.’—from the blurb.

More Pam Brown here. Her Attention Span for 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003. Back to directory.

Victor Coleman | Icon Tact: Poems 1984-2001 | Book Thug | 2006

Sardonic and sometimes savagely funny, other times just plain pissed-off; now and again tender, or screwball. Coleman, who reads widely, should be better known and warrants wide readership—and if the last three words make me sound like Elmer Fudd, well, Coleman would enjoy that.

George Deem | Let George Do It | Post-Apollo | 2009

Paintings and drawings; prose and verse. George Deem, who died in 2008, was a language artist, as well as a painter. As Ulla Dydo says in her introduction, this book “is not about painting, it is about writing.” A modest treasure. I’ve turned to it more than once, since I got it a few months back.

Lorne Dufour | Jacob’s Prayer | Caitlin | 2009

Simple prose is hard to write, and even harder to sustain. Dufour does it brilliantly, evoking the hardships of life in a British Columbia aboriginal village where he was schoolteacher, and the people who saved his life during and after a freak storm on hallowe’en in 1975. Sheer unpretentious good writing; generous, warm, loving—and political as Dickens.

George Economou | Ananios of Kleitor: Poems & Fragments and Their Reception from Antiquity to the Present | Shearsman | 2009

A wonderful romp through the petty, predatory and even campy squabbles and pedantry of certain scholars of Ancient Greek texts, at the same time funny and informative. Economou has a terrific parodic ear for the grave tones of scholarship, and an equally terrific poetic ear for the real delights of ancient Greek lyric. A tour de force.

Susan Holbrook and Thomas Dilworth, ed. | The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: Composition as Conversation | Oxford | 2010

Long needed, superbly edited, indispensible.

Kevin Killian and David Brazil, ed. | The Kenning Anthology of Poet’s Theatre1945-1985 | 2010

Generous (so many plays! so many really good ones!). Eye-opening. Inspiring. Useful. A great read. Let’s hope for a follow-up volume.

Ammiel Alcalay, general editor | Lost And Found: The CUNY Poetics Documentary Initiative Series I | CUNY | 2009

Five issues, each with a different editor, issued in seven fascicles: selected correspondence of Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn; selected correspondence of Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara; Muriel Rukeyser on Darwin; selections from Philip Whalen’s Journals; Robert Creeley and Daphne Marlatt at the Vancouver Poetry Conference 1963. Series II, promised for Fall 2010, will include Muriel Rukeyser, Jack Spicer, and others. Need I say more?

Gérard de Nerval, trans. Richard Sieburth | The Salt Smugglers: History of the Abbé de Bucquoy | Archipelago | 2009

Nerval’s cheeky and indeed risky Tristram-Shandyish response to the crazy law in the Second French Republic (July 1850) which through exorbitant stamp-tax made impossible the publication of fiction in newspapers. Nerval’s quest, serialized in Le National, for the memoir of the man who actually escaped from the Bastille, which he once glimpsed on a bookstall but did not buy, has its occasional longueurs, but the whole thing is a nicely comic demolition of easy distinctions between fact and fiction. Not previously published in English, in excellent translation, with valuable introduction and relevant annotations.

Jacques Roubaud, trans. Jeff Fort | The Loop | Dalkey Archive | 2009

The second installment of The Great Fire of London, Roubaud’s highly resourceful and deeply moving Oulipean struggle with memory and loss; to read this is to skirt terrible despair, yet strangely enough to come out of it refreshed, strengthened.

José Saramago, trans. Margaret Jull Costa | Death With Interruptions | Houghton Mifflin | 2009

“The following day no one died” opens this story in which Death takes a vacation. Saramago’s gift here is a clear-sighted logic which exposes and ridicules (with hilarious ingenuity) the profound and absurd ineptitude of all expediency. The novel turns out to be a passionate defence and celebration of love and compassion—but to say that is to sound clichetic. If there is a cliché in the book, then it’s a fresh one.

More Peter Quartermain here. His Attention Span for 2008, 2006. Back to directory.

Gustaf Sobin | Collected Poems | Talisman | 2010

The poetry book of the year, for me. A gorgeous summation of Sobin’s lyric achievement. Should be on every American poet’s bookshelf.

Anne Carson | NOX | New Directions | 2010

Lisa Robertson | R’s Boat | California | 2010

Andrew Joron | The Sound Mirror | Flood | 2009

He really has the best ear of any poet I know writing in English. Trance Archive (City Lights, 2010) is also worth any reader’s time who isn’t already following Joron’s work.

Evelyn Reilly | Styrofoam | Roof | 2009

Sandy Florian | Prelude to Air from Water | Elixir | 2010

In my opinion, and for what little comparisons may be worth, Florian is the most original practioner of the Anglophone prose poem in our moment. Her other 2010 title is Of Wonderland & Waste, from Sidebrow.

Yang Lian, trans. Brian Holton | Riding Pisces | Shearsman | 2008

A major contemporary Chinese poet who has not yet found his American audience. He’s better served in Britain, where his other recent collections include Concentric Circles (2006) and Lee Valley Poems (2010).

Julie Carr | 100 Notes on Violence | Ahsahta | 2010

Keith Waldrop | Several Gravities | Siglio | 2009

The perfect companion to his ever-so-slightly-earlier volume Transcendental Studies, which won the National Book Award. The collages are wonderful, and the selection of his lyric work is judicious.

Jack Collom & Lyn Hejinian | Situations, Sings | Adventures in Poetry | 2008

Mahmoud Darwish, trans. Fady Joudah | If I Were Another | FSG | 2009

*

Also rereading pretty much all of Leslie Scalapino and Fanny Howe this summer—at least the lyric work—alongside some Alice Notley I’d missed hitherto. Waiting for some new/fresh time to read J. Michael Martinez’s Heredities, which looks fantastic, and the new translation of Raul Zurita’s Purgatorio from California.

More G.C. Waldrep here. Waldrep’s Attention Span for 2009, 2008, 2006, 2004. Back to directory.

Simon Thompson | Why Does It Feel So Late? | New Star | 2009

Bryher | The Player’s Boy | Paris Press | 2006

Laura Jaramillo | Civilian Nest | Love Among the Ruins | 2010

Rachel Blau DuPlessis | Pitch: Drafts 77-95 | Salt | 2010

Edwin Rolfe | Collected Poems | Illinois | 1993

Jane Unrue | Life of a Star | Burning Deck | 2010

George R. Stewart | Names on the Land | New York Review of Books Classics | 2008

John Clare | The Shephard’s Calendar | Carcanet | 1996

Homer, trans. Stanley Lombardo | The Odyssey | Hackett | 2000

Ange Mlinko | Shoulder Season | Coffee House | 2010

Daniel Bouchard’s Attention Span for 2009, 2005. Back to directory.

Elizabeth Arnold | Effacement | Flood | 2010

Günter Eich, trans. Michael Hofmann | Angina Days: Selected Poems | Princeton | 2010

Manny Farber, ed. Robert Polito | Farber on Film | Library of America | 2009

Graham Foust | A Mouth in California | Flood | 2010

Ruth Harris | Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion and the Scandal of the Century | Metropolitan | 2010

Tony Judt | Ill Fares the Land | Penguin | 2010

Gabriel García Márquez, trans. Asa Katz | Clandestine in Chile | New York Review Books | 2010

Marilynne Robinson | Absence of Mind | Yale | 2010

Frances Stoner Saunders | The Woman Who Shot Mussolini | Metropolitan | 2010

Ben Sonnenberg | Lost Property: Memoirs & Confessions of a Bad Boy | Summit | 1991

More John Palattella here. Palattella’s Attention Span for 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005. Back to directory.

Pedro Ramos | Black Scabbard Research Centre | self-published | 2010

A pamphlet of menacing b&w coastal photos by a young Portuguese photographer who lives in Australia. It uses original work as well as photos appropriated for various media and friends. Highlights include a child sitting on a dead shark, a cliff diver, kissing teenagers, a bat being fed with a syringe, and a back-lit figure in a hoodie. Ramos is from Madeira Island, and his photos have been particularly helpful as work on a manuscript about my birthplace, Galveston, with my dad, using photos he took of the island about thirty years ago. Galveston has the dubious distinction of being featured in a forthcoming low budget sci-fi film, Monsters. Set mostly in Mexico and on the border, the movie’s scenes of devastated, carpet-bombed landscapes were filmed on Galveston after hurricane Ike. The film’s editor said “But we didn’t really need to create an illusion of mass destruction in Galveston,because it was already there, everywhere, after the hurricane. All we had to do is block out any view of the highway in the background. Otherwise, we got millions of dollars’ worth of production design for next to nothing.”

Samuel Amadon | Like a Sea | Iowa | 2010

Like a Sea is a formally restless book full of restless poems that are by turns aphoristic, hilarious, image-driven, sad, and meditative. As various as the poems are, Amadon’s voice is clear, albeit a chorus.

Rae Armantrout | Versed | Wesleyan | 2009

I heard Armantrout read for the first time earlier this year. I liked her poems before the reading, I loved them after. This book has plenty of the wit of pain, the pain of wit, etc.

Anne Carson | Nox | New Directions | 2010

I’ve mostly just stared at the pages of Nox, wishing I could place memoir and history in such elegant folds as does Carson. I think Rexroth would have gone apeshit for this thing.

Brandon Downing | Lake Antiquity | Fence | 2009

Lake Antiquity is beautiful and it makes me laugh.

Andrew Joron | Trance Archive | City Lights | 2010

What an ear! “Constellations for Theremin,” an excerpt of which is in this book, is one of the most stunning poems I’ve come across in a long time. Joron writes like someone born yesterday to parents from tomorrow.

Ayane Kawata, trans. Sawako Nakayasu | Time of Sky & Castles in the Air | Litmus | 2010

Another great translation by Sawako Nakayasu. I was lucky to read this in manuscript form, and I’ve been rereading it since. Ayane Kawata’s terrifying dreams make for awesome poems.

Ibn Khalawayh, trans. David Larsen | Names of the Lion | Atticus/Finch | 2009

One of the most beautiful books I’ve ever seen (designed by Michael Cross), Names of the Lion is better beheld than commented on. Larsen’s introduction and notes are excellent.

César Moro | La tortuna ecuestre y otros poemas en español | Biblioteca Nueva | 2002

I heard about Moro last summer from a Peruvian friend. Unfortunately, he’s pretty much unknown to English readers and very little of his work has been published in translation. We’re doing a feature on him in Mantis, publishing some of his French poems from Love Until Death (he wrote mostly in French, his second language, after moving to Europe in his twenties). La tortuga ecuestre y otros poemas en español consists of his first book and some uncollected early work.

Sawako Nakayasu | Texture Notes | Letter Machine | 2010

A book of surfaces and dreams, voyages and events, measurements, meals, colors, and, above all, the body pressed up against the world. Another year, another great book by one of my favorite poets.

William Wylie | Route 36 | Flood | 2010

Flood did a terrific job producing this book of b&w photos of landscapes and small town architecture in Kansas and Colorado. An introduction by Merrill Gilfillan provides some context. My dad is a documentary photographer, and I’ve always been interested in the lyrical possibilities of projects like this that reflect the essential gaze. I hope Flood publishes more photography titles, and I’m definitely going to look into Wylie’s other books.

More Joshua Edwards here. Edwards’s Attention Span for 2009, 2007. Back to directory.