Attention Span 2012 | Minal Singh, Kaveh Bassiri, and friends

Jerome Rothenberg | 25 Caprichos a partir de Goya | Calamus Poesia

Mark Liedner| Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me | Factory Hollow

Joshua Edwards and Van Edwards | Campeche: Poems & Photographs | Noemi

Kim Gek Lin Short | China Cowboy | Tarpaulin Sky

Mary Jo Bang, trans. | Dante’s Inferno: A New Translation | Graywolf

Gina Abelkop | Darling Beastlettes | Apostrophe

Sommer Browning | Either Way I’m Celebrating | Birds LLC

Roger Sedarat | Ghazal Games | Ohio

Julian T. Brolaski | gowanus atropolis | Ugly Duckling

Andrea Rexilius | Half of What They Carried Flew Away | Letter Machine

Loren Erdrich and Sierra Nelson | I Take Back the Sponge Cake | Rose Metal 

Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody, and Vanessa Place, eds. | I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women | Les Figues

Julia Bloch | Letters to Kelly Clarkson | Sidebrow 

Rebecca Lindenberg | Love, An Index | McSweeney’s

Brandon Shimoda | O Bon | Litmus

Tomaz Salamun | On the Tracks of Wild Game | Ugly Duckling

Matthew Henriksen | Ordinary Sun | Black Ocean

Dan Magers | Party Knife | Birds LLC | #

Eric Baus | Scared Text | Center for Literary Publishing

Raúl Zurita | Songs For His Disappeared Love | Action

Joshua Corey and G.C. Waldrep, eds. | The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral | Ahsahta 

Dot Devota | The Eternal Wall | Cannibal

Héctor Viel Temperley, trans. Stuart Krimko | The Last Four Books of Héctor Viel Temperley | Sand Paper

Joyelle McSweeney | The Necropastoral | spork 

Frances Richard | The Phonemes | Les Figues

Joseph Harrington | Things Come On: An Amneoir | Wesleyan

Dana Ward | This Can’t Be Life | Edge| $

Farid Matuk | This Isa Nice Neighborhood | Letter Machine

Noel Black Uselysses | Ugly Duckling | *

Anna Moschovakis | You and Three Others are Approaching A Lake | Coffee House

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These titles were selected by

C. Violet Eaton
Chris Martin *
Douglas Hahn #
Jared White
Kaveh Bassiri
Mary Austin Speaker $
Minal Shekhawat
Robert Alan Wendeborn
Carrie Murphy
Rosa Alcala
Russel Swensen
Sara Nicholson
Steven Karl

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* Microreview of Noel Black’s Uselysses (Ugly Duckling) by Chris Martin 

A much anticipated full-length debut, Black’s book enfolds libraries within its wings, which flap about on sonar-taut lines. It’s a book of friendship and derangement, hope and domestic adventure. It concludes with the New Narrative’s newest classic, “Prophecies for the Past,” which Kevin Killian called “the sort of reading experience they must have invented poetry for.” And Noel wrote that shit in prose.

 Chris Martin is the author of American Music (Copper Canyon 2007) and Becoming Weather (Coffee House 2011).

# Microreview of Dan Magers’ Party Knife (Birds LLC) by Doug Hahn 

Party Knife‘s poems are boiling with dark humor, quiet rage, and poignant sadness. They weave the conscious and unconscious with an Ashberian intensity that verges on schadenfreude, but in the end we glimpse the everyday sublime. On the surface level, these poems are very funny and very bizarre, but they are also fine examples of poetic form and do indeed have a profound overall meaning—this is what makes the book special to me: in a world filled with either self-important or glib post-MFA projects, here is a poet who excels at both entertainment and instruction. On a more personal note, I worked and lived as a poet in post-9/11 New York City for many years, and this is a book that embodies the artist’s experience in that horrible and amazing place in American time.

$ Microreview of Dana Ward’s This Can’t Be Life (Edge) by Mary Austin Speaker

The book that I anticipated most this year is Dana Ward’s This Can’t Be Life, published by Edge Books. Typing Wild Speech, Dana’s excellent chapbook, is included here in full and bowled me over just as much as it did the first time I heard him read from it. To hear Dana read, or to read him on the page, is to hear the unflinching inner monologue of someone who prizes social interaction as much as the drive to make art and is as exploratory in each endeavor. “Take for instance the notion of ‘poet.’ I’ve allowed a lot of myth to hold sway over how I perform that for myself. . . . How to be ‘poet,’ ‘partner,’ ‘good friend,’ on & on. How resolve all this practical alienation,” he writes, fully aware of both the banalities (with which he quickly dispatches) and the moral consequences of asking such a question. It’s brave, totally compelling writing, and beyond that, it is joyful and anxious and stylish and very, very smart.

Mary Austin Speaker is the author of the chapbooks The Bridge (Push Press, 2011) and 20 Love Poems for 10 Months (forthcoming from Ugly Duckling); a collaborative play, I am You This Morning You Are Me Tonight, written with her husband, poet Chris Martin; and the forthcoming full-length collection, Ceremony, due out in 2013 from Slope Editions.

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