Attention Span 2010 – Nada Gordon

Stan Apps | Universal Stories with Unknown Particulars | valeveil e-book | 2009

A work of conscience and searching thought: What does poetry do in the world? What does it do for us?

Lynn Berhrendt | petals, emblems | Lunar Chandelier | forthcoming 2010

My blurb: “The affect-drenched poems in Lynn Behrendt’s Petals/Emblems leap off beauty’s edge right on to the electrified grid of being: that difficult ‘barrage/ of having been born/ at all.’ There (here) everything’s objective correlative: love and pain ‘crave form like alms’ and surely find it, sensuous, phonic, and unsettling, ‘heavy’ with ‘gyn grief’ and ‘undaunted desire.’ ‘This ache to tell you something’ shoots the poems through with yearny rhetorical force like the ‘inward arch’ of ‘nostalgic ocean’: palpable, fluid, engulfing.”

Charles Bernstein | All the Whiskey in Heaven | Farrar | 2010

Do I even need to say why?

Brandon Brown | The Orgy | self-published | 2010

I wrote on Ululations that this book “… spreads a metaphorical net onto the orgy of late capitalism in the hyper-information age (‘this crystal mall must be destroyed’); and most compellingly, to me, it seems to refer back on itself to the orgy of writing that makes itself felt in every moment of this galvanized, kind of emo (in the best possible sense: ‘My heart struggles./ It’s big as a chard, but it never learns.’) poem.”

K. Lorraine Graham | Terminal Humming | Edge | 2009

I blurbed this one, too. [All “this shining and this _utter [!].” Terminal Humming is a very exciting book and I love it. Eavesdropping and borrowing from diverse discourses, K. Lorraine Graham has created a complex “essay on scrounging.” It is a wonderfully violent “attempt to unleash inner badness” in poems that are hot and audacious, in a girly way: “Wonder Woman boots twirl twirl.” Terminal Humming is just the right amount of weird. In it, “kinks become beautiful and obvious,” and “language [hums] as angry form.” Read this “downwind chess urine bird bathing extravaganza” of a book!]

Michael Gottlieb | Memoir and Essay | Faux | 2010

A moving, witty, precise and somewhat theatricalized bildungsroman. How he got this way.

Carla Harryman | Adorno’s Noise | Essay | 2008

Like psychedelics for the intellect.

Rodney Koeneke | Etruria | manuscript

Exquisite. Someone please publish this. This is poetry exuding the most poignant possible elegance.

K. Silem Mohammad | Sonnagrams 1-20 | Slack Buddha | 2010

Don’t be surprised if you find yourself ROLLING ON THE FLOOR LAUGHING upon reading these poems. Seriously. Kasey is my idol.

Mel Nichols | Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon | Edge | 2009

Mindbogglingly delicate and audacious, all at once.

Lanny Quarles | chapbooks

He sent us an envelope of chapbooks which I loved. Gary squirreled them away somewhere so I can’t check titles. Endlessly inventive!

Ariana Reines |The Cow | Fence | 2006

I know I’m late to this one, but wow, The Cow. She packs a punch.

Monica de le Torre | Public Domain | Roof | 2008

It’s conceptual! It’s funny! It’s whip-smart! It’s art!

Dana Ward |Typing Wild Speech | Summer BF Press | 2010

All the outspilling radiance of life and death here, like a pop Proust or a more-beatific-than Kerouac Kerouac.

PLUS: live computer-facilitated performances of Danny Snelson (“Mabuse”) and Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford (“The Ballad of the Death of Spring”) Why limit ourselves to the page? This is a future of poetry.

More Nada Gordon here. Her Attention Span for 2005. Back to directory.