Attention Span 2011 | Dan Thomas-Glass

Andrew Zawacki | Glassscape | Projective Industries | 2010

As I wrote on the 30 Word Review of this one: “I love the ‘tendons & tensions’ of the line/break, [Andrew] Zawacki’s attention to “global capital                    ’s local / cater- / waul.” I’ll admit to a minor Andrew Zawacki obsession. Dude can write.

Brian Ang | Paradise Now | Grey Book | 2011
Brian Ang | Communism | Berkeley Neo-Baroque | 2011

Brian Ang is moving toward something big & loud & unapologetic. He is diving into something. I do not always understand the tracks he leaves but I relish the motion.

Dana Ward | Typing Wild Speech | Summer BF | 2010
Dana Ward | The Squeakquel | The Song Cave | 2011

Someone (I can’t remember who) said Dana Ward is picking up where Bruce Boone left off. Nada Gordon recently said: “where Sartre gets nauseated, Dana sees kinetics and light.” Those kids are all right, but what grabs me & won’t let go, what’s uniquely him, is the abundant love of people in there. Dana Ward loves us, people, get up.

VA | Displaced Press | 2011

I bought the subscription. $50 for books by Thom Donovan, Brandon Brown, Suzanne Stein, Samantha Giles, Taylor Brady & Rob Halpern. This is so exciting. Brian Whitener et. al. are doing such awesome work, it deserves its own entry.

erica lewis | camera obscura | BlazeVOX | 2010

Taught this book to seventeen eighth-grade girls. It prompted reams of writing, turning a classroom into a camera obscura, questions about time, experience, memory, photography, & a bunch more. Can’t wait to do it again.

Joseph Lease | Testify | Coffee House | 2011
Joseph Lease | X Angel City | Sacrifice | 2010

Before this year I hadn’t read Joseph Lease. The fact that that fact changed is one of the things I will remember about this year. These dreamy & intensely felt poems believe so hard they make you believe along with them.

Juliana Spahr | Well Then There Now | Black Sparrow | 2011

“Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache” is in my personal top-ten of best poems of the naughts. It’s found a beautiful new home among a range of other previously published work here; the whole is an impressive statement of Juliana Spahr’s aesthetic & concerns. 

Lauren Levin | Keenan | Lame House | 2011
Lauren Levin | Not Time | Boxwood | 2009

Lauren Levin’s chaps were big for me this year. She is doing something that not even the hyper-gendered hyperbole of Ron Silliman’s excitement a couple years back does justice to. These rad clashy ping-pong lines, big loops of sound & thinking. Watch out world.

Michael Cross | Haecceities | Cuneiform | 2010

Big but also tight. Constrained but so effusive. Every time I pick this book up I hear a new angle of language, some lost repose of history. Michael Cross has a project that is so different from most; I’m very happy he’s doing it.

Phoebe Wayne | Lovejoy | c_L Books | 2010

Phoebe Wayne is a librarian by trade, so she thinks about cataloguing & preserving. That kind of thinking becomes very interesting in the world of public art on freeway pillars set to be demolished, as in the case of Lovejoy. It is also very interesting in the context of poetry itself, & chapbook publishing in particular. The ephemera that this list is part of the project of cataloguing, too—& the beautiful phrases we get to sculpt of our hours.

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Dan Thomas-Glass is a poet and teacher in the East SF Bay Area. He edits With + Stand.

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