Attention Span 2010 – Joshua Edwards

Pedro Ramos | Black Scabbard Research Centre | self-published | 2010

A pamphlet of menacing b&w coastal photos by a young Portuguese photographer who lives in Australia. It uses original work as well as photos appropriated for various media and friends. Highlights include a child sitting on a dead shark, a cliff diver, kissing teenagers, a bat being fed with a syringe, and a back-lit figure in a hoodie. Ramos is from Madeira Island, and his photos have been particularly helpful as work on a manuscript about my birthplace, Galveston, with my dad, using photos he took of the island about thirty years ago. Galveston has the dubious distinction of being featured in a forthcoming low budget sci-fi film, Monsters. Set mostly in Mexico and on the border, the movie’s scenes of devastated, carpet-bombed landscapes were filmed on Galveston after hurricane Ike. The film’s editor said “But we didn’t really need to create an illusion of mass destruction in Galveston,because it was already there, everywhere, after the hurricane. All we had to do is block out any view of the highway in the background. Otherwise, we got millions of dollars’ worth of production design for next to nothing.”

Samuel Amadon | Like a Sea | Iowa | 2010

Like a Sea is a formally restless book full of restless poems that are by turns aphoristic, hilarious, image-driven, sad, and meditative. As various as the poems are, Amadon’s voice is clear, albeit a chorus.

Rae Armantrout | Versed | Wesleyan | 2009

I heard Armantrout read for the first time earlier this year. I liked her poems before the reading, I loved them after. This book has plenty of the wit of pain, the pain of wit, etc.

Anne Carson | Nox | New Directions | 2010

I’ve mostly just stared at the pages of Nox, wishing I could place memoir and history in such elegant folds as does Carson. I think Rexroth would have gone apeshit for this thing.

Brandon Downing | Lake Antiquity | Fence | 2009

Lake Antiquity is beautiful and it makes me laugh.

Andrew Joron | Trance Archive | City Lights | 2010

What an ear! “Constellations for Theremin,” an excerpt of which is in this book, is one of the most stunning poems I’ve come across in a long time. Joron writes like someone born yesterday to parents from tomorrow.

Ayane Kawata, trans. Sawako Nakayasu | Time of Sky & Castles in the Air | Litmus | 2010

Another great translation by Sawako Nakayasu. I was lucky to read this in manuscript form, and I’ve been rereading it since. Ayane Kawata’s terrifying dreams make for awesome poems.

Ibn Khalawayh, trans. David Larsen | Names of the Lion | Atticus/Finch | 2009

One of the most beautiful books I’ve ever seen (designed by Michael Cross), Names of the Lion is better beheld than commented on. Larsen’s introduction and notes are excellent.

César Moro | La tortuna ecuestre y otros poemas en español | Biblioteca Nueva | 2002

I heard about Moro last summer from a Peruvian friend. Unfortunately, he’s pretty much unknown to English readers and very little of his work has been published in translation. We’re doing a feature on him in Mantis, publishing some of his French poems from Love Until Death (he wrote mostly in French, his second language, after moving to Europe in his twenties). La tortuga ecuestre y otros poemas en español consists of his first book and some uncollected early work.

Sawako Nakayasu | Texture Notes | Letter Machine | 2010

A book of surfaces and dreams, voyages and events, measurements, meals, colors, and, above all, the body pressed up against the world. Another year, another great book by one of my favorite poets.

William Wylie | Route 36 | Flood | 2010

Flood did a terrific job producing this book of b&w photos of landscapes and small town architecture in Kansas and Colorado. An introduction by Merrill Gilfillan provides some context. My dad is a documentary photographer, and I’ve always been interested in the lyrical possibilities of projects like this that reflect the essential gaze. I hope Flood publishes more photography titles, and I’m definitely going to look into Wylie’s other books.

More Joshua Edwards here. Edwards’s Attention Span for 2009, 2007. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2009 – Joshua Edwards

Eleanor M. Bender, ed. | Open Spaces, Number 29, Spring | 1980

I came across this not long ago, while looking through books at my parents’ home. It’s a 64-page staple-bound poetry magazine. On the cover is a photo my dad took of two young poets. One of them is Harryette Mullen, and it turns out she was poet-in-residence at the Galveston Arts Center, where my dad directed the gallery. I always thought that I’d never met a “poet” until I left Texas and went to college in Oregon, but she was a friend of my parents when I was one year old. More proof that they’re far cooler than I gave them credit for when I was in high school. The magazine also includes work by Ahmos Zu-Bolton II, Marge Piercy, X. J. Kennedy, Susan Ludvigson, Robert Wilkinson, Tess Gallagher, Carolyn Kizer, and Marilyn Hacker.

August Kleinzahler | Sleeping It Off in Rapid City | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 2008

Kleinzahler keeps me on my toes with his vocabulary, wit, and formal variety, and this book makes me want to write poems in ballparks, streetcars, hotel rooms, and diners. I’ve just moved to the Bay Area, and I’m sure I’ll often wander through the fog with these poems in mind.

Eugene Ionesco, trans. Donald Watson | Rhinoceros | Penguin | 2000

If Beckett had dropped acid and interpreted certain themes in Moby Dick in a play …

Kenneth Rexroth, trans. | One Hundred Poems from the Chinese | New Directions | 1971

For ten months I was in Shanghai, so this anthology of T’ang and Sung Dynasty poets was a constant companion as I tried to figure out what was under the sidewalk besides the subway. Su Tung P’o (a.k.a. Su Dongpo or Su Shi) is represented by some amazing poems.

Kenneth Rexroth, trans. | One Hundred Poems from the Japanese | New Directions | 1977
Kenneth Rexroth & Ikuko Atsumi, trans. | Women Poets of Japan | New Directions | 1977

I was too busy eating during a month-long trip around Japan to read much of anything, but ever since leaving I’ve pulled these classics from the shelf and have been rereading them constantly. Lady Otomo No Sakanoe’s “Have I learned to understand you?” is perhaps the most beautiful rhetorical question I’ve ever read.

Rimbaud, trans. Wallace Fowlie | Complete Works, Selected Letters | The University of Chicago Press | 1966

“Mon triste cœr bave à la poupe” says it all.

Sawako Nakayasu | Hurry Home Honey | Burning Deck | 2009

In the wrong hands love can get old fast, but Sawako Nakayasu’s fantastic and inventive poems are as contemporary as Cupid’s arrows get. This book is a must-read for anyone who has a heart.

Tod Marshall | The Tangled Line | Canarium Books | 2009
Ish Klein | UNION! | Canarium Books | 2009

We were super lucky to get Tod’s and Ish’s books for our first two Canarium single-author titles. I’ve read them both at least a dozen times, and I keep coming back for more.

Haruki Murakami | What I Talk About When I Talk About Running | Knopf | 2008

I like this book but only because I’ve been on a running kick and Murakami makes writing prose seem fun. But overall, it’s poorly organized and often flat—it should have been called something like “Notes Toward a Book About Running.” Still, good for anyone training for a road race or a triathlon, etc., and often funny.

More Joshua Edwards here.