Attention Span 2010 – Stephen Collis

Kaia Sand | Remember to Wave | TinFish | 2010

Site-specific poetry at its best—collages, documents, and roller derby—what more could you ask for? Sand continues to produce some of the most earnest, delicate, and pointed political poetry out there.

Jane Sprague | The Port of Los Angeles | Chax | 2009

What Sand does with Portland, Sprague takes up in Los Angeles, only with more thorough-going lyricism. Ikea products come ashore, drug dealers get busted, and the commons once again raises its head amidst new enclosures—”this / in the how now moment sullied biosphere.” One of my favorite poetry books to come along in a while.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis | Pitch: Drafts 77-95 | Salt | 2010

The next installment of DuPlessis’s major life-long poem, now getting up over 800 pages all told. I’m finding the increasing pleasure is in following the Drafts back “down the ladder,” as it were, along the line of 19, as there are now 5 poems in each 19-poem cycle which pass over each other once again, picking up on stray elements, deepening and contorting themes.

Lissa Wolsak | Squeezed Light | Station Hill | 2010

Long one of the best under-recognized poets, Wolsak’s new “collected” includes everything from The Garcia Family Co-Mercy and Pen Chants to her amazing prose-poem/essay, An Heuristic Prolusion. Precise thought, compressed imagery, and a deeply human sense of the universe and our fragile place in it. A book to keep close by at all times.

Jeff Derksen | Annihilated Time: Poetry and Other Politics | Talon | 2009

Selected essays from one of his generation’s seminal poet-critics. Need to know what neoliberalism is and how poetry (as it must) bites the hand that feeds it? This is your book. I know of no other writer who can so seamlessly move from complex analyses of political economy to wry readings of avant-garde poetry.

Rachel Zolf | Neighbour Procedure | Coach House | 2010

Poems from a stay in Palestine, the opening section, “Shoot & Weep,” is alone worth the price of admission—some of the most powerfully affective statistics (!) I have ever read, as Zolf weaves magic out of Butler’s Precarious Life.

Jules Boykoff | Hegemonic Love Potion | Factory School | 2009

Along with Derksen, Rodrigo Toscano, and Kevin Davies, one of my favorite guides to the perplexing terrain of late neoliberal mayhem—and what poetry might be doing there. Sharp, sharp wit. News that indeed stays news.

Josely Vianna Baptista | On the Shining Screen of the Eyelids | Manifest | 2003

A late discovery for me, and the press might not exist any more, but Baptista’s poems, in Chris Daniels’ painstaking translations, certainly satisfy Dickinson’s requirement that poetry take the top of your head off. South American concrete, material lyricism—this is language as I want to meet it—a net thrown over another world.

Erín Moure | My Beloved Wager | NewWest | 2009

Essays from some 30 years of a writing life, reading Moure on translation—amongst other things—is a marvel, instructive and electrifying. I have deeply enjoyed this book.

More Stephen Collis here. Back to directory.

Attention Span – Marie Buck

Helen Adam, ed. Kristin Prevallet | A Helen Adam Reader | National Poetry Foundation | 2007

Jules Boykoff | The Slow Motion Underneath | The Dusie Kollektiv | 2007

If you can’t buy a hardcopy, you can download Boykoff’s poems here.

Martha Dandridge Custis, Lawrence Giffin, eds. | Comment is Free, Vol. 1: Participatory Politics for a New Age | Lil’ Norton | 2008

Jean Day | Odes & Otium | Adventures in Poetry | 2006

Johanna Drucker | Night Crawlers on the Web | Granary | 2001

Mina Loy, ed. Roger L. Conover | The last lunar Baedeker | Jargon Society | 1982

Make sure to get the 1982 edition, not the more recent (which has the same editor and is titled nearly the same thing). The 1982 edition is considerably bigger, for one. (You may need to go to a really good library to find it.)

K. Silem Mohammad | Breathalyzer | Edge | 2008

Gabriel Pomerand, trans. Michael Kasper and Bhamati Viswanathan | Saint Ghetto of the Loans: Grimoire | Ugly Duckling | 2006

Leslie Scalapino | That They Were at the Beach—Aelotropic Series | North Point | 1985

Rod Smith | Deed | Iowa | 2007

Hannah Weiner, ed. Patrick F. Durgin | Hannah Weiner’s Open House | Kenning | 2006

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More Marie Buck here.

Attention Span – Tom Orange

Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand | Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space | Palm Press | 2008

The smartest demonstration and open invitation I’ve seen of what a poetics off the page and engaged with the world does, can and might look like.

Benjamin Friedlander | The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes | Subpress | 2007
Laura Moriarty | A Semblance: Selected Poems: 1975-2006 | Omnidawn | 2007

Overviews from two of our most important poets at mid-career, presenting new opportunities to see where they’ve come from and where they’ve now brought us.

David Harvey | A Brief History of Neoliberalism | Oxford University Press | 2007
Naomi Klein | The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism | Picador | 2008

Particularly instructive when read together.

Maggie Nelson | Women, The New York School and Other True Abstractions | University of Iowa Press | 2007

It’s about time someone like Nelson has come along to explode the conventional wisdom on these matters! Her refusal to accept the terms of debate on their own terms is utterly refreshing.

Michael Pollan | The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World | Random | 2002
Michael Pollan | The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals | Penguin | 2007

“Everything’s connected” goes the ecological credo, but Pollan’s exemplary studies show that credo operating with new subtleties and depth, a true parti pris des choses that is at once a profoundly important politics and ethics as well as ecology.

Rod Smith | Deed | University of Iowa Press | 2007

What the small press poetry world has known for years now finally garners national attention: this is a poetry to be reckoned with.

Charles Gayle (alto sax), Sirone (bass) & Rashied Ali (drums) | Stadtsaal, Burghausen (Germany) | 8 March 2008 | audience recording circulated via dimeadozen.org

With this formidable rhythm section behind him, Gayle trades in his trademark scorched-earth tenor saxophone for a lighter and sweeter horn. Be assured, his alto tone is still incredibly biting and intense, but it’s somehow more soulful, warmer, more human. He has blended the blusey wail of Ornette Coleman, the flurrious attack of John Coltrane and the ecstatic leaps of Albert Ayler with his own genius to become a true master of the idiom.

Harmony Korine | Mister Lonely | IFC Films | 2008

An expatriate Michael Jackson impersonator alone in Paris finds the company of kindred spirits when he is invited by a Marilyn Monroe to join a commune of other impersonators in the Scottish highlands. The trailer for this film made it look overly sentimental and sappy  — in stark contrast to the shock tactics of Korine’s previous efforts (Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy). To my surprise, however, and with the addition of flying nuns under guidance by Werner Herzog in cameo, Korine has put together a truly touching mediation on freedom, marginalization and utopia, and what it means to discover and be yourself in all its joyous possibilities and painful limitations. Attending the Nashville premier, which featured a special appearance and Q&A session by hometown hero Korine, was an added bonus.

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More Tom Orange here.

Attention Span – Joel Bettridge

Richard Deming | Let’s Not Call It Consequence | Shearsman Books | 2008

Rachel Zolf | Human Resources  | Coach House | 2007

Sophocles, trans. John Tipton | Ajax  | Flood | 2008

Mark Scroggins | The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky | Shoemaker & Hoard | 2007

Jonathan Edwards | “A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections” | in A Jonathan Edwards Reader |Yale | 2003

Marcel Proust | Swann’s Way | Random House | 1934

Ted Pearson | Encryptions |Singing Horse | 2007

Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand | Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Space  | Palm Press | 2008

Ulf Stolterfoht, trans. by Rosmarie Waldrop | Lingos | Cuneiform Press | 2007

Linda Russo | Mirth | Chax | 2007

Elizabeth Arnold | Civilization | Flood | 2006

Attention Span – Rodney Koeneke

K. Silem Mohammad & Anne Boyer, eds. | Abraham Lincoln issues 1-3 | NA | 2007-2008

Nascent American sensibility change in easy-to-staple trading card form.

Hannah Weiner | Hannah Weiner’s Open House, ed. Patrick Durgin | Kenning | 2006

Each room has many mansions. More doors, please, soon.

Gary Sullivan | PPL in a Depot | Roof | 2008

Brecht shutting cell phone to mustachio Mozart with Caucasian circle chalk. “Between the dark and the thyme soufflé … mmmm …”

Philip Whalen | The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen, ed. Michael Rothenberg | Wesleyan | 2007

New eyes for old wineskin yclept “Beat.”

Sharon Mesmer | Annoying Diabetic Bitch | Combo | 2008

Dear Poetry: Please can you be like this sometimes always?

Kevin Killian | Selected Amazon Reviews, ed. Brent Cunningham | Hooke | 2006

The nation speaks through its stars—Reviewer #80 is America’s Most Wanted detourniste.

Maryrose Larkin | The Book of Ocean | i.e. | 2007

Newton’s apple fallen and washed to Eve’s, sent into re-orbit: poems for a world like that.

Benjamin Friedlander | The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes | subpress | 2007

Transatlantic two-step for treated Bösendorfer. My feet slip over at ends of lines, like when you trip in dreams. Your catching yourself’s the poem.

Alicia Cohen | Debt and Obligations | ms | forthcoming, 2008

To make Temecula and connected earth systems versus all reason sweet and green. “Actual people breathe the ghost.”

K. Silem Mohammad | Breathalyzer | Edge | 2008

That thing Greil Marcus said about buying an album of Dylan breathing hard? That. Esp. when breath moves like this. “There’s no way we’re not going to start a ruckus in a country town.”

Jules Boykoff & Kaia Sand | Landscapes of Dissent: Guerilla Poetry and Public Space | Palm | 2008

Field manual for the practice of not sitting on hands, pitched against “the almost imperceptible social octave known as normality.”

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More Koeneke here.