Third Factory/Notes to Poetry

Michael Farrell | thempark | Book Thug | 2010

thempark uses Ashbery’s Where Shall I Wander and Hotel Lautréamont as templates. Which is to say, the poems take Ashberian hairpin-bends and fill them with a million nanobots. Some are built from the data of top-40 jams and TV broadcasts, some are the gnats that asphyxiate inside a fruit salad tub, some are outtakes from a doco on Australian tea biscuits and birdsong.

John Paetsch | Hex Nihilo | bas-books | 2011

This is the future: Philadelphia is flanked by the Pacific Ocean, trees are data-sets, everything is smuggling everything else and speeding up a highway, aliens are radios like Spicer told us years ago. The future has two modes: prose so funny it pulls groins; sparse verse that empties guts.

J. Gordon Faylor | Sebaceous Heph | bas-books | 2010

This book has you right on the edge of getting a joke, limbered yet straining for relief, hands about to clap: you’re right there… And then, the syntax does a sneaky, rude little deviation and you’re suffering the immensely cruel pleasure of not-knowing. It’s perfect timing, perfect anti-comedy, and smart in a way that squeezes sebum everywhere.

Kieran Daly | PLAYS / FOR THEATRE | bas-books | 2011

This collection speaks to the performance(s) of: proposition, philosophy and non-philosophy, gift economy, chronic boredom, auto-didacticism, tinkering, naming. You have a window, carpet, access to light, you are in a performance, and it’s that perfect moment where you laugh because it’s truly funny to just be moving your elbow or fixing a pipe.

Chris Alexander | Panda | Truck | 2011

This book was composed collectively by anyone who’s ever described the panda from Kung Fu Panda. This book was curated perfectly by Chris Alexander, who shows the inexhaustible, partial, oriented, polemical, dedicational labour of description. This book is an Everybody’s Autobiography.

Leslie Scalapino | How Phenomena Appear to Unfold | Litmus | 2011

A brilliant collection of essays somewhere between poetics, criticism, event-theory and demonstration of an entirely alien grammar that does everything at once. Scalapino reads and writes into four dimensional cubelets, cubelets that construct truly new things for thinking.

Charles Bernstein | Attack of the Difficult Poems | Chicago  | 2011

Queer pedagogies, queering pedagogies. This book is about professing, teaching, file-sharing and reading-as-writing, because of, and in spite of, all manner of constraint.

Kristen Gallagher | We Are Here | Truck | 2011

One has historically asked oneself: is light made of particles or waves? And the answer, these days, is generally: both! Like, when, you’re dreadfully lost and can’t find your way on a map, you both are and are not located, and you both are and are not moving meaningfully. In this book, you try to find a house, and find something a lot more interesting. As Stein would say, there is no there there! Thankfully!

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Astrid Lorange is a PhD candidate, poet, teacher, researcher, occasional band member and homebrewer from Sydney, Australia. Her books include Eating and Speaking, Minor Dogs and Pussy pussy pussy what what (Au lait day Au lait day).

Back to 2011 directory.

Derek Beaulieu | Seen of the Crime | Snare | 2011 (forthcoming)

Collected short essays from the fearlessly indefatigable, inquisitive, and generous poet, letraset master, micro-press publisher, and collector of literary curiosities. I haven’t seen the final manuscript, but an early draft suggests that this will be the practical, earnest compliment to the abstruse theoretical wink of Notes on Conceptualisms.

Gregg Biglieri | Little Richard the Second | Ugly Duckling | 2011

A gorgeous new book by my favorite poet. Little Richard offers a lyric meditation on doubling (echo), words (and letters), and the +ow (/wo) effect. Wow. The philosophical aviary of these post-objectivist stanzas resound with all the interlingual puns that can pass in the augenblicke of Minerva’s insomniac bird (which blinks rarely, and has two eyelids, but is the only bird to blink like humans do). Printed letterpress on luxuriously doubled sheets of laid Neenah paper, with elegant hand-sewn Japanese stab-binding and a device evoking the culture ministry of some central asian dictatorship.

Kieran Daly | Plays/ For Theater | bas-books | 2011

I’ve been genuinely surprised and excited by everything I’ve seen from Daly, which suggests that there is still some room left for both the reduction and expansion of conceptual writing before the mode is played out (and Daly pushes in both directions simultaneously). This is hard-core conceptual theatre in which bibliography takes center stage. Gertrude Stein meets Jarrod Fowler.

Judith Goldman | l.b.; or, catenaries | Krupskaya | 2011 (forthcoming)

The concatenated series of poems in Judith Goldman’s l.b chart the narratives formed by texts of uniform density hanging freely from two fixed readings not in the same semantic line. On the one hand, the book dramatizes language under the regimes of contemporary communication—the protocols and phatics of privatized and publicly traded language—with all the false and inescapable sociality of networked media and commercial memoranda. On the other hand, the motivated material play of the signifier points to the paths of greatest resistance: chance, ludic laughter, and the recalcitrant residuum of the body.

At the level of composition, l.b is also a kind of catena patrum: a series of extracts from earlier writings, forming a commentary on some portion of scripture. Goldman’s finely sutured microcollage of forms and phrases moves from Aristotle to Andy Warhol, Kathy Acker to William Wordsworth, Abu Ghraib to Thomas Wyatt. Where the traditional catena is also a chronological series of extracts to prove the existence of a continuous tradition on some point of doctrine, here the discrepant result is a more thoroughly, honestly, chronic text: not the false time of doctrine and tradition, but something more true to its own time, and to linguistic time itself.

Helen Hajnoczky | Poets and Killers: A Life in Advertising | Snare | 2010

As if Rob Fitterman wrote a season of Mad Men, Hajnoczky gives us the life story of a character told exclusively through the language of corporate advertising, with the publication date of the (actual) found text keyed to the corresponding year of his (fictional) life. Given the degree to which North Americans are all shaped by the interpellating hail of commercial media, this is also the biography of many of its readers as well. The book, sporting a handsomely textured purple cover decorated with ‘pataphysical gidouilles, contains a generous and considered Afterword. Snare, run by Jon Paul Fiorentino in Montréal, has rapidly established itself as a press to watch and a venue of envy for conceptual writers.

Yedda Morrison | Darkness | Make Now | 2011 (forthcoming)

Morrison has produced an edition of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in which only references to the natural world remain. But what counts as “natural” is far from self-evident, and Morrison’s erasures open onto a range of philosophical and ethical questions. At one extreme, the reader begins to suspect that perhaps we can never recognize a truly natural world, one uncoloured by our human perspective, at all. And at the same time, at the other extreme, one begins to suspect that maybe there is nothing—including our own artifice—that is not in fact a part of an all-encompassing natural world after all.

The test of conceptual writing is the degree to which the distance between the concept and the execution creates enough friction to generate a spark across that gap. Here, the ethereous space between the idea and the text—between mind and body, artifice and nature, erasure and source—ionizes with violent disruption and report.

Joseph Mosconi | Galvanized Iron on the Citizen’s Band | Poetic Research Bureau | 2009

Each poem here is a mash-up of euphemistic cant, with one half taken from the slang of soldiers and the other from the code of truckers (the G.I. and C.B. of the deacronymized title). The results come across like eroticized slogans, often with an uncomfortable and vaguely aggressive comedy. The thin, oversize hardback is bound like a primer for early readers, with the text set in an enormous 25-point Times New Roman, as if Jenny Holzer were excerpting lines from mid-career Bruce Andrews’ poems, to be printed on billboards or bumperstickers. Conceptual, wry cultural critique, with one ear to the art world and one ear to the microphonemics of the best Language writing. Two poems, just to give a taste: “Gucci/ Kit/ Diesel/ Cop”; “Shamurai/ Cash/ Box.”

Travis Ortiz | Variously, Not Then | Tuumba | 2011 (forthcoming)

The book I have been most anticipating for the longest time. Ortiz has taken a finely polished series of prose poems (originally composed in a west-coast, post-language, ‘90s mode of socially motivated radical parataxis) and written through them both lexically and typographically. The result simultaneously displays both the remixes, with their delicious lines like “geography towers is narrative,” and also the original texts. Those originals are the epitome of their genre, and so opening Variously is like discovering a forgotten time-capsule containing a pristine print from a lost, never-screened film documenting its own vanished golden-age. A treasure chest, in other words. Luxuriously designed, and a rare issue from Lyn Hejinian’s revamped Tuumba press.

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven | Body Sweats | MIT | 2011 (forthcoming)

Edited by Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo (an interesting poet in her own right – see Parlance [Coach House, 2003]), this long-needed collection remaps the frontiers of Modernism by allowing us to fully see, for the first time, just how radical von Freytag-Loringhoven’s writing was. We know her performative persona was something to be reckoned with (she scared the shit out of William Carlos Williams, offering to infect him with her syphilis in order to help free up his poetry – they ended up more than once in fistfights on his suburban front lawn), but her linguistic fearlessness puts her in the same league as Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, and Abraham Lincoln-Gillespie. Moreover, these poems will be a wake-up-call to many contemporary poets: a century later the Baroness’ work is still as drastic as anything being published today.

Eric Zboya | Translations | Avantacular | 2010

Two volumes, in collaboration with Andrew Topel, of “algorithmic” translations, which transform the letters of a poem into extruded dendrites of exploded non-lexical exclamation. Abstract, illegible geometric patterns in a densely inked but subtly-shaded blue-black sheen, each shape is determined by an alphabetic logic that human viewers can appreciate but cannot reconstruct. A new idiom for digital poetry, visual poetry, and appropriation.

Steven Zultanski | Pad | Make Now | 2010

Ultimately more about the tension between the literal and the figural imagination than the Beavis and Butthead idée fixe of its domestic inventory (the book purports to catalogue every object in Zultanski’s apartment and whether or not his dick can lift it), PAD nonetheless suggests a new kind of confessional autobiography, filtered through the strategy of a clinically deodorized conceptualism. In the process it creates a new meter, and gives a parodic send-up of the charge that Conceptual writing is a phallocentric guy-thing. Zultanski’s premise begs its anatomical sequel—whether every object in an apartment fits in a writer’s vagina—which would offer yet another a new scale for classifying possessions but with a radically different psychological twist. I’m looking forward to that book, which I trust is being written as I type, if it’s not already in press. In the meantime, the bottom line: I can lift Steven Zultanski’s PAD with my dick.

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More Craig Dworkin here.

Dworkin’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009, 2007 . Back to 2011 directory.

Erik Anderson | Poetics of Trespass | Otis Books/Seismicity | 2010

Guillaume Apollinaire | Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War | California | 2004

John Barrell and John Bull, editors | English Pastoral Verse | Oxford | 1975

Dedicated to Tom Raworth!

Charles Baudelaire | “Correspondences”| Various translators and publishers

A thousand translations of an untranslatable poem.

Teju Cole | Open City | Random | 2011

Bernadette Mayer | Memory | North Atlantic | 1975

Pattie McCarthy | Verso | Apogee | 2004

Deborah Meadows | Saccade Patterns | BlazeVOX | 2011

Jena Osman | The Network | Fence | 2010

Kevin Varrone | G-Point Almanac: Passyunk Lost | Ugly Duckling | 2010

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Marcella Durand is the author of most recently Traffic & Weather (Futurepoem), AREA (Belladonna) and Deep Eco Pre, with Tina Darragh, available from Little Red Leaves. She’s currently finishing up a new collection, tentatively titled Montage in the Feuilleton.

Durand’s Attention Span for 2010, 2008, 2006, 2005, 2004. Back to 2011 directory.

Kate Bernheimer | Horse, Flower, Bird | Coffee House | 2010

Suzanne Buffam | The Irrationalist | Canarium | 2010

Bruce Covey | Glass Is Really a Liquid | No Tell | 2010

Jennifer Denrow | California | Four Way | 2011

Matt Hart | Wolf Face | H_NGM_N BKS | 2011

Nathan Hauke | S E W N | horse less | 2011

Becca Klaver | LA Liminal | Kore | 2010

Joseph Lease | Testify | Coffee House | 2011

Patti Smith | Just Kids | Ecco | 2010

Laura Solomon | The Hermit | Ugly Duckling | 2011

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Gina Myers is the author of A Model Year (Coconut Books) and several chapbooks, including False Spring (forthcoming from Spooky Girlfriend). She lives in Atlanta, GA.

Myers’s Attention Span for 2009, 2008. Back to 2011 directory.

Benjamin Friedlander | Citizen Cain | Salt | 2011

I used to think of “flarf’ as embodying the poetics of insincerity. Ben Friedlander’s book has changed my mind. This is a sincere book, and it’s really weird and wonderful. This stanza, opening the poem (title lifted from Baraka) “Somebody Blew Up America,” provides a kind of framework for the collection’s many modes: “The poem you just heard was ironic and this one is sincere. / How can you tell? Because it was written in ‘my’ voice.” Don’t ask the criteria for insincerity but rather think what the search terms might have been: “The special sin that arouses God’s anger is in reality an aborted baby.” That’s just language from the Web, right? How about “the sticky / white load he pumped on her toes. / Bookmark this site.” I’ve never read such a variety of contemporary voices commandeered in poems. Yet for all the noise that might suggest the poems read with consistent grace and an even pace despite their detachment from the Literary. And they’re hard voices to identify. Maybe it’s better not to think too much about who they may be or represent or where they come from, either as individuals or composites. The Web is dark and strange: your keyboard is a Ouija board that can summon a wide array of spirits. They show up and begin to reflect or speak to your preoccupations, even demons. Better to read with your eyes slightly out of focus (like being online too long) to get a picture of the poet shaping these poems (in 4, 3, or 2 line stanzas, almost exclusively) and the umami of sensibility. This is a good book of poetry. This is a funny book. “Remember Vietnam? No, not really. / But I do remember what shaq did / last year in the playoffs. Hoooooooo!” (16) Jewish culture, user feedback, user profiles, modern poetry, politics (“Senator shithead”), internet porn: not many books published today make me think ‘oh, I could never write this’ and also elicit respect in the form of envy. Pound appears throughout the book, a significantly higher number of times than placenta, and placenta is no small presence. Read “Alterity Cudgel,” “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” and “Me and My Gang” (“Sexy Librarians of the Future \ are behind you, with a big strapon \ called Knowledge . . .”) and then just jump around. If someone who doesn’t regularly read poetry wants to know what book they should purchase by a living poet, Citizen Cain is a lively choice.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis | The Collage Poems of Drafts | Salt | 2011

It’s not a difficult shift from the thickness and rich verbal density of all the preceding of DuPlessis’s Drafts to this new mostly-visually based format. The mode of collage isn’t new to Drafts and the pictorial element (four color at that!) in this collection has strong ligatures cementing the continuity of the overall project. Somewhere she has said she thinks of Schwitters all the time, a claim substantiated and made quite apparent in the materials and arrangements of these works. Attentive readers will see familiar themes, processes and words sustained here from earlier incarnations and with a similar richness resulting: “A process of scraping, of ripping, of pasting. . . . Mite and mote.”

Edgar Lee Masters | The Great Valley | MacMillan | 1916

Published a year after Spoon River Anthology, Masters broadens his sustained meditation on American history and society in a book that is very long and very prosaic. But its flatness is somewhat countered by the sheer range of interest the poet takes in so many things, and the belief that there is so much to give voice to, and so many worthy. The title refers to Illinois, and the elegies within sing of long forgotten figures, mostly local. The Lincoln–Douglas debates, Dreiser, and Robert Ingersoll are among the better known subjects. (I couldn’t help but think of Sufjan Stevens’s Illinoise throughout.) Honestly, I lost interest about halfway thru the book but I am glad I read the entire thing. Masters is a lot more than just the famous Spoon River. There is a fat selected poems waiting to be created. It should aim to bring the best of his work back into view.

Bryher | The Fourteenth of October | Pantheon | 1952
Bryher | Roman Wall | Pantheon | 1954
Bryher | Beowulf | Pantheon | 1956
Bryher | Ruan | Pantheon | 1960

Byher’s historic novels have a pattern: a boy’s coming of age tale in which he is caught up in the forces of history. His native land is in the throes of turmoil: Saxon England fighting the Norman invasion; a Roman outpost fighting the plundering Goths; London during the Blitz; a druid heir fleeing the conversion of Cornwall to Christianity. In each narrative there is a slackness or incoherency to the society which makes it vulnerable. Old ties and traditions will soon be washed away. There is usually one character who knows better and can see the peril coming but no one will listen to them and then it’s too late. In this, Bryher herself is represented directly. She wrote in her memoirs that she saw WWII coming years before it began. But, alas, no one would listen. She acknowledges a deep influence by G.A. Henty, a nineteenth century novelist who wrote adventure stories for juveniles. Bryher’s attention to detail for what life may have been like for common people at turning points of history across many centuries makes her stories vivid and interesting. All of the books can be read rather quickly. The Player’s Boy and The Coin of Carthage are among her best. Her two memoirs, The Heart of Artemis and The Days of Mars, are not to be missed.

Brook Holgum, ed. | The Capilano Review: George Stanley issue | Vancouver | 2011

A festschrift for George Stanley, San Francisco-born Canadian poet: interviews, photographs, recollections, dedicatory poems and critical takes. As if that were not enough the issue also contains the debut of Stanley’s serial poem After Desire which alone is worth the price of admission.

Humbert Wolfe | Humoresque | E Benn | 1926

Wikipedia describes him as “an Italian-born English poet, man of letters and civil servant, from a Jewish family background.” A contemporary of Pound and Eliot, Wolfe’s work falls to the lighter side of poetry. Prolific in the 1920s and 30s (he died in 1940) he left a largely forgettable body of work. But once in a while there is a gem:

I looked back suddenly
into the empty room
and saw the lamp that I had lit
still shining on the little table by the window
and throwing its light on the tumbled sheets of paper
on which I had been writing.

And I felt as though long years ago a man,
whom I had know very little,
had lighted that lamp,
and sat by the window writing and believing that he was a poet,
and then he came out of the room and found the letter.

He would not go into the room again:
And not he, but I will go in softly
And put out the lamp,
And lay aside the useless paper.

Joseph Torra | What’s So Funny | Pressed Wafer | 2011

This short novel is the narrative of a washed-up comedian on the verge of quitting his trade. Angry, depressed, misanthropic, not even his trademark biting humor gives him satisfaction anymore. “Is there anything more sickening than a couple falling in love?” His marriage is long over, his family distant, dead or in decline. “Could there be anything sicker than the concept of baptism? That some precious newborn baby is born in sin, and has to be cleansed?” The pathos of the story, the loneliness and sadness of an individual who can’t see or won’t admit or simply can’t overcome the causes of his suffering, is nearly drowned by the humor with which the material, and life, attempts to redeem itself. Finally you realize you are reading the transcript of one long comedy routine. Childhood, sex, race, religion, dating, therapy, war, porn, the usual and not so usual material of stand up, are all grist for the mill. “If everyone would lie about Santa, they’ll lie about God.”

Joe Elliot | Homework | Lunar Chandelier | 2010

Cedar Sigo | Stranger in Town | City Lights | 2010

Jennifer Moxley | Coastal | The Song Cave | 2011

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Daniel Bouchard’s poetry books include The Filaments (Zasterle Press) and Some Mountains Removed (Subpress). He edited The Poker for many years. An essay on George Stanley’s work appeared recently in The Capilano Review, and an essay on Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts is posted at Jacket2.

Bouchard’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009, 2005. Back to 2011 directory.

Bruno Bosteels | The Actuality of Communism | Verso | 2011

A fantastically useful orientation guide for the recent boom in political theory: Ranciere, Moreiras, Badiou, Zizek, various others. I can’t say I share the basic supposition, regarding the virtue of formalizations of concepts which attend the non-abstract problem of state form. But I was grateful to understand a bunch of stuff much better after reading.

Silvia Federici | Caliban and the Witch | Autonomedia | 2004

We read this book in reading group in the summer; I was interested to discover that many others’ experiences of it were quite different from mine. Someone took it as a defense of witchiness, rather than a history of how the conjured threat of feminine dark magic served as pretext to dispossess and discipline women. Well okay. But I have been pretty obsessed with revisiting the Italian Marxist feminists; while it seems to me more and more that their male comrades (Negri, Virno, Marazzi) got really crucial things wrong, they themselves were making some of the great breakthroughs of the era, ones that are with us more than ever, I think.

Jean-Marie Gleize | Tarnac, un acte préparatoire | Seuil | 2011

What poetry should be doing, if one is willing to submit to the ambiguous discipline of the word “should.”

David Harvey | Enigma of Capital | Oxford | 2010

Basically a primer version of the longer and more ambitious Limits to Capital, attempting to recast it along the lines of his Brief Introduction to Neoliberalism. And indeed it is lucid, clear, systematic, and persuasive: a nice reminder that spending decades thinking about a problem set can lead to refinement and immediacy of ideas rather than the opposite. In that sense it’s like a refutation of the idea of “Late Style.” But actually I miss the grander version: in the condensation and reader-friendliness of this account, certain explanations of causality within the dynamic of capital become too clear, too one-directional, less dialectical, and even sometimes mistaken. Of little matter. The best recent guide to the most complex man-made object in the word, endlessly useful, and with luck it will lead readers to the fuller and more frustratingly suspended—and finally more adept—versions.

Uyen Hua | a / s / l (age / sex / location) | ingirumimusnocteetsonsumimurigni | 2011

Tao Lin with a soul, albeit a fascinating and strange one, provisionally new.

Ke$ha | Animal | RCA | 2010

Vomiting up tequila and glitter.

Christopher Nealon | The Matter of Capital | Harvard | 2011

It is a delight to watch this book become influential, not because it deserves it—it does—but because it is clearly advancing the conversation.

Pasolini | In Danger: A Pasolini Anthology | City Lights | 2010

Pasolini! who had to leave the communist party to be a better communist! Reading this I was reminded of “On A Generation That Squandered Its Poets,” and how we tend to think of that essay as concerning how communism ruined, wasted, and killed its blindingly beautiful writers—until we revisit the essay, and rediscover that the story it tells of Mayakovsky unfolds his misery arising from the failure of the revolution to be communist enough, the ways that it stopped short, blunted itself, made concessions, quit the promise of its total radicality. Also, a couple of the Pasolini poems are translated by Jonathan Richman, which is just the oddest thing in the world. Trying to parse the subterranean connection between the atmospheres of Friulia and the summer air of Route 128 when it’s late an night is a real mindfuck.

Arthur Rimbaud trans. John Ashbery | Illuminations | Farrar | 2011

I haven’t read this yet but I’m sure it’s great.

McKenzie Wark | The Beach Beneath the Street | Verso | 2011

There is some sense now that histories of the Situationist International are like Harry Potter fanfic; the main impulse is to sustain the imagined experience of life in that bohemian Hogwarts of the group’s milieu in a neighborhood or two in mid-century Paris. The vital difference is that there is a self-reflexive claim here about what the imagination might be for, other than self-sustaining profitability.

Ellen Willis | Out of the Vinyl Deeps | Minnesota | 2010

“Willis’s music writing was clear and direct, without gamesmanship, but never one-dimensional. No one had previously captured the nuanced double motion in which rock could generate untold pleasures, presentiments of freedom and equality and unfettered sexuality—but could never escape the gravity of the exclusions and inequities and unacknowledged labor on which it depended. This dialectical conception of the world and its workings can be as every bit as revolutionary as rock, the last great invention of the postwar boom.”

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Joshua Clover is a Professor of English Literature at University of California Davis. He is currently at work on a book tentatively entitled The Epic of Capital, bringing together the study of poetry with contemporary political economy, and finishing a poetry collection called Tranche/Syntagma.

Clover’s Attention Span for 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003. Back to 2011 directory.

Susan Briante | Utopia Minus | Ahsahta | 2011

Stanley Cavell | Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory | Stanford | 2010

Matthew Cooperman | Still: Of The earth as the Ark Which Does Not Move | Counterpath | 2011

Robert Duncan | H. D. Book | California  | 2011

Forrest Gander | Core Samples of the World | New Directions | 2011

Susan Howe | That This | New Directions| 2010

Farid Matuk | This Isa Nice Neighborhood | Letter Machine | 2010

Peter O’Leary | Luminous Epinoia | Cultural Society | 2010

Ron Padgett | How Long | Coffee House | 2011

Poets and Painters | Tibor de Nagy | 2011

Elizabeth Willis | Address | Wesleyan | 2011

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Richard Deming is the author of Let’s not Call It Consequence (Shearsman, 2008) and Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading (Stanford UP, 2008).  He teaches at Yale University.

Deming’s Attention Span for 2008. Back to 2011 directory.

Joseph Bradshaw | In the Common Dream of George Oppen | Shearsman | 2011

This collection is the imagining of Oppen’s time away from poetry in Idaho, after Idaho. The listening hard to those poems that never came from that time: thoughts unwritten as poems; actual poems; talks with the Elephant Man and Jack Spicer; Bradshaw talks with Bradshaw himself through the form of the essay; a sifting through the silences found in biography and verse.

Rachel B. Glaser | Pee On Water |Publishing Genius | 2010

A collection of short stories that encourage you to sit on the wet lawn near a dog in a sweatshirt with your tongue in the mouth of someone becoming somewhat special, some history books open in your lap as you hold the Nintendo controller in both of your hands pressing a+b+a+b+a+b+a+b+select+start then, just before you start feeling “woozy” because of the smell of your somewhat special person’s deodorant, you begin to grow increasingly excited for tip off of game six of the NBA Finals.

Daniel Borzutzky | The Book of Interfering Bodies | Nightboat | 2011

This is what I wrote to Daniel in a FB exchange regarding this book: “One of the most important books of poetry I’ve been in for months. Rarely seen an American poet able to write about our U.S. underbelly without sacrificing the poem or giving way to lyric gloss. This book is so important and I’ll tell everyone who loves poetry and anyone who’s unsettled about what they sense is out there to read it slowly. I can’t help but to think this book is what Stevens had in mind when he talked of the imagination being grounded in reality. But of course, Stevens so often brought the world so far into his head, and you seem to acknowledge the messiness of the world. This book gets at the paralysis created by tragedy. You’ve done it.”

Michael Kimball | Us | Tyrant Books | 2011 (First Tyrant Books edition)

Oh, death. This is as available as language can get on the subject of watching the person you love get sick, get a little better, and then not. This is how slow I imagine letting go will be. Caring for as long as someone can care, then strained like never before to pull back.

Mathias Svalina | Destruction Myth | Cleveland State University Poetry Center | 2010

Mathias Svalina knows in the beginning both the imagination and the actual world began their forms together, roughly alike. Humor accumulated. Waste was accounted for. Sadness instructed, forgot, told stories and carefully pulled the lid off the ant farm before starting all over again, uncomplicated and aware as humanly possible.

Heather Christle | The Trees The Trees | Octopus | 2011

There is a workshop (not a poetry workshop, silly; the dusty, dirty alone kind) where all the things like airplanes and falsely blue skies are sent, so they can lose their dreadful statistics, so they now grow eggs that could pass for scissors, and celebrate birthdays that straighten out our lives, speaking up in a honest enough voice, without question.

Mark Leidner | Beauty Was the Case That They Gave Me | Factory Hollow | 2011

Mark Leidner knows that what is most offensive is what we are capable of saying we are like, only to say were are not like that at all. These poems may prove O’Hara downright wrong about what he said concerning romantic comedies. These poems make me feel like I have nothing to lose – that I am stupid, that I am so so wasteful when I don’t return home from belt shopping with an image and an idea locked in a shootout with a room full of heartless people convinced they are falling in love.

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Jordan Stempleman’s most recent collections of poetry are Doubled Over (BlazeVOX Books, 2009) and No, Not Today (Magic Helicopter Press, forthcoming). He co-edits The Continental Review, teaches writing and literature at the Kansas City Art Institute and curates A Common Sense Reading Series.

Stempleman’s Attention Span for 2010, 2007. Back to 2011 directory.

We give a slight edge to perception over conception.

Ken Belford | Decompositions | Talon | 2010 

Camille Martin | Sonnets | Shearsman | 2010

Donato Mancini | Buffet World | New Star | 2011

Thomas A. Clark | The Hundred Thousand Places | Carcanet | 2010

Arakawa and Madeline Gins | Mechanism of Meaning | Abrams | 1979

Josef Albers | Interaction of Color | Yale | 2006

Donald Judd | Complete Writings 1959-1975 | NSCAD | 2005

Mark Goldstein | Tracelanguage: A Shared Breath | BookThug | 2010

Laynie Browne | The Desires of Letters | Counterpath | 2010

Dorothea Lasky | Poetry Is Not a Project | Ugly Duckling | 2010

Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch | Ten Walks/Two Talks | Ugly Duckling | 2010

(With longing glances toward Stephen Collis’s On the Materials and Joseph Massey’s At the Point, which unjustly remain in the reading pile.)

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Mark Truscott is the author of Said Like Reeds or Things (Coach House, 2004), Nature (BookThug, 2010), and Form: A Series (BookThug, 2011). He lives in Toronto.

Truscott’s Attention Span for 2008. Back to 2011 directory.

Bhanu Kapil | (a poem-essay, or precursor: NOTES: for a novel: Ban en Banlieues) | Belladonna* | 2011

Because lying in the street for a long time is beautiful and necessary and also violent.

Matthew Goulish | 39 Microlectures | Routledge | 2000

“Do whatever you need to with this book, and, if possible, do not let it damage your thoughts.”

Pamela Lu | Pamela: A Novel | Atelos | 1998

It took me a long time to get to this, and now I need to get to the next one, but I loved its intimacy and searching.

Octavia Butler | Kindred | Doubleday | 1979

This novel is amazing in its movement through time and in its narrative voice, which is crystalline.

Amanda Ackerman | The Seasons Cemented | Hex Presse | 2010

Like paying attention to a single line in a highly ornamental design, and then the next one, and then the next. Empty space is there too.

Violette Leduc, trans. Derek Coltman | The Lady and the Little Fox Fur | Peter Owen | 1967

There is pleasure in this short novel, for a character and for a reader, even when it seems as if a word like ‘pleasure’ should have gone missing.

Ronaldo Wilson | Poems of the Black Object | Futurepoem | 2009

Dreaming until it takes shape. And then achingly clear.

Marguerite Duras, trans. Eileen Ellenbogen | The Vice-Consul | Pantheon | 1968

A “sequel” of sorts to The Ravishing of Lol Stein, there’s a humor in this novel I haven’t found in other works by Duras.

Renee Gladman | TOAF | Atelos | 2008

The kind of book that makes one want to write; I would follow this narrative voice wherever it took me.

Danielle Dutton | Sprawl | Siglio | 2010

The accumulations become more and more addicting and so do the shining singularities.

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Amina Cain is the author of I Go To Some Hollow (Les Figues, 2009). She lives in Los Angeles.

Back to 2011 directory.