Attention Span 2011 | Leonard Schwartz

Raul Zurita, trans. William Rowe | Inri | Marick | 2009

This extraordinary Chilean poet is now more fully available to English language readers.

Raul Zurita, trans. Anna Deeny | Purgatory | California | 2010

Zurita’s poetry is both Orphic and politically powerful at once.

Maged Zaher | Portrait of the Poet As An Engineer | Pressed Wafer | 2009

The contemporary writer the furthest inside and the most outside the English language as we know it….

Gustaf Sobin | Collected Poems | Talisman | 2010

This book brings a life-work together… “A national treasure,” just as Rain Taxi wrote.

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

Finally!

Evie Shockley | The New Black | Wesleyan | 2011

These poems prove that poetry can think.

Brenda Iijima, ed. | (Eco (Lang) (Uage (Reader)) | Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs / Nightboat | 2010

This anthology is crucial reading for those seeking out a more complicated relationship to “nature” than “nature poetry” would otherwise offer.

Jonathon Stalling | Grotto Heaven | Chax | 2010

A poetry that works its way into the space between the languages English and Chinese as no one has been able to manage before….

Susan Gevirtz | Aeordome Orion & Starry Messanger | Kelsey Street | 2010

Technique sharpens the imagination into a new relationship to the sky, which is and is not a limit.

John Taggart | Is Music | Copper Canyon | 2010

Taggart’s Selected allows us to listen to this poetry deeply. Does anyone have a better ear than John Taggart?

Kiki Smith and Leslie Scalapino | The Animal Is In The World Like Water In Water | Granary

This exquisitely produced book, a collaboration between artist Smith and poet Scalapino, shocks and delights. Smith’s drawings and Scalapino’s poems from the book are reproduced in part in How Phenomena Appear to Unfold, 2011, from Litmus Press—but the Granary ultra-suede edition is very special and gets you the whole work.

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Leonard Schwartz’s latest book will be At Element, forthcoming in November 2011 from Talisman House. Schwartz’s Attention Span for 2009, 2006. Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2011 | G.C. Waldrep

Not necessarily my “favorites” over the past year, but these are the eleven books I spent the most time thinking about, in no particular order:

Peter Larkin | Terrain Seed Scarcity | Salt | 2001

Somehow I missed this when it originally came out. A magisterial anthem and model of challenging ecopoetics, stretching towards the post-human (perhaps) but very, very beautiful. I have been fantasizing about quitting my day job and spending the next six years or so studying this text. (Larkin also has a new collection, Leaves of Field, from Shearsman, but I haven’t read it yet.)

Laynie Browne | Roseate, Points of Gold | Dusie | 2011

The best collection so far by a mid-career poet not enough of my friends and colleagues know about.

Laura Mullen | Dark Archive | California | 2011

Adonis, trans. Khaled Mattawa | Selected Poems | Yale | 2010

John Taggart | Is Music: Selected Poems | Copper Canyon | 2010

I still wonder whether one of Taggart’s earlier single volumes (perhaps When the Saints) isn’t the best introduction to his work, but he is an absolutely essential and underrecognized poet. I’m still hoping this volume will convene a larger audience for his work.

Dana Levin | Sky Burial | Copper Canyon | 2011

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

Harriet Tarlo, ed. | The Ground Aslant: Radical Landscape Poetry | Shearsman | 2011

If you’ve been wondering where the interesting contemporary British poetry is hiding, you can find quite a bit of it here (including the abovementioned Peter Larkin and also Elisabeth Bletsoe, whose second collection, Landscape from a Dream [Shearsman, 2008], is worth finding).

Zach Savich | Annulments | UP of Colorado | 2010

Maryrose Larkin | The Name of This Intersection Is Frost | Shearsman | 2010

Jonathan Stalling | Grotto Heaven | Chax | 2010

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Also: Forrest Gander, Core Samples from the World (New Directions, 2011); Dan Beachy-Quick, Circle’s Apprentice (Tupelo, 2011); Jean Valentine, Break the Glass (Copper Canyon, 2010); C.D. Wright, One with Others (Copper Canyon, 2011); Timothy Donnelly, The Cloud Corporation (Wave, 2010); Melissa Kwasny, The Nine Senses (Milkweed, 2011); Harold Schweizer, On Waiting (Routledge, 2008); Seyhan Erözçelik (trans. Murat Nemet-Nejat), Rosestrikes & Coffee Grinds (Talisman, 2010); Mahmoud Darwish (trans. Fady Joudah), If I Were Another (FSG, 2011); René Char (trans. Mary Ann Caws & Nancy Kline), Furor & Mystery and Other Writings (Black Widow, 2011); John Yau, A Thing among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns (D.A.P., 2008), Shane McCrae, Mule (Cleveland State, 2010).

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G.C. Waldrep’s latest collections are Archicembalo (Tupelo, 2009) and Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (in collaboration with John Gallaher; BOA Editions, 2011). Projective Industries just released his chapbook, ‘St. Laszlo Hotel.’ He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University and serves as editor-at-large for The Kenyon Review. Waldrep’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009, 2008, 2006, 2004. Back to 2011 directory.