Attention Span 2011 | Gina Myers

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.

Attention Span 2011 | Robin F. Brox

David Hadbawnik | Field Work: notes, songs, poems 1997-2010 | BlazeVOX | 2011

At times like being a voyeur behind the book’s eyes, sweet, honest, uncomfortable, surprising, moving between modes and geography and relationships, moving through time, a book to enjoy reading.

Italo Calvino, trans. Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks, William Weaver | The Complete Cosmicomics | Penguin | 2002

Delightfully strange and oddly comforting, a yogic stretch for the imagination.

Tony Lopez | Only More So | Uno | 2011

As dense and challenging as ever, Lopez’s most recent work sustains itself longer, thick stripes of word culled from an intricate lace of sources, transmuted by a skilful, subtle hand.

JodiAnn Stevenson | The Procedure | March Street | 2006

The languages of legality and failed romance intermingle in this collection of hauntingly-worded pieces, heartstrings unraveling through divorce proceedings, bittersweet freedom of a particular failure.

Mark Rothko, ed. Miguel López-Remiro | Writings on Art | Yale | 2006

One of the most astonishing collections of critical statements about art I’ve ever encountered. “Address to Pratt Institute, 1958” is of particular note.

Audre Lorde | The Black Unicorn | Norton | 1978

It was time to reread Lorde: “I leave poems behind me / dropping them like dark seeds that / I will never harvest / that I will never mourn / if they are destroyed / they pay for a gift / I have not accepted.”—from “Touring”

D.H. Lawrence | The Plumed Serpent | Martin Secker | 1928

Perfectly brutal.

Gina Myers | A Model Year | Coconut | 2009

Compelling and without pretension, intelligent poems born from paying attention to one’s world and life.

Virginia Woolf | Mrs. Dalloway | Harcourt Brace | 1990

Energetic, human, as fresh as the flowers given Clarissa, time had come to revisit this text.

Herman Melville | Moby-Dick or The Whale | Penguin Classics | 1992

Gloriously tragic and often downright funny, it had been too long since I’d read what I most enjoy from Melville, better this fourth time through than I had dared hope!

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Robin F. Brox is the founder of Saucebox, a small feminist press & occasional performance series. Actor & technical director for Buffalo Poets Theater, recent work includes “When In Doubt, Cowboy Out,” from her process-derived poem A. Concoct Key Gush Run, available from Binge Press (2011), & Sure Thing, a full length collection of poems from BlazeVOX [books] (2011).

Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2009 – Gina Myers

Alan Bernheimer | Billionesque | The Figures | 1999

Adrienne Rich | A Human Eye: Essays on Art and Society, 1996 – 2008 | W.W. Norton | 2009

Frank Sherlock | Over Here | Factory School | 2009

d.a. levy | Suburban Monastery Death Poem | reprint by Bottom Dog Press/deep cleveland press | 2005

Jon Leon | Hit Wave | Kitchen Press | 2008

Becca Klaver | Inside a Red Corvette: A 90s Mixtape | Greying Ghost | 2009

Edmund Berrigan | Glad Stone Children | farfalla press | 2008

More Gina Myers here.

Featured Title – The Nancy Book by Joe Brainard

Joe Brainard | The Nancy Book | Siglio | 2008 | Goodreads | LibraryThing | 4 mentions in Attention Span 2008

A much-anticipated event, heightened even further for me by getting to see the exhibit at Colby College, Maine, at which many of these works were on display, earlier this summer. (K. Silem Mohammad)

“I have burned down the sky.” (C.E. Putnam)

Also mentioned by Richard Deming and Gina Myers,

Featured Title – The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño, trans. Natasha Wimmer | The Savage Detectives | FSG | 2007 | Goodreads | LibraryThing | 5 mentions in Attention Span 2008

The tale of two wild poet boys in an On The Road Adventure… at least that’s how the book is characterized by reviewers. It seems to me to be more about the attempt to recover the mythology of poetry and the bohemian ethic of beauty, love, and self-indulgence … remember when we were racy, spontaneous, scandalous, drunk, oversexed, high on ambition, low on productivity? Not me, I came of age in the 90s. But I remember clearly thinking that literature ended with my generation—now that’s youth! Bolaño hits it on the head (sometimes…). In my reading, however, Natasha Wimmer is the true genius here—she’s clearly an amazing writer herself, and the book reads as if it was written in English. Quite a feat, given how raunchy most of the language is. (Kristin Prevallet)

I read it too, and it’s as good as they say. The best conventional novel about avant-gardism ever! (Stan Apps)

Mentioned by Gina Myers, Allyssa Wolf, and Michael Kelleher.