Posts Tagged ‘Lissa Wolsak’
Attention Span 2011 | James Wagner
Cedar Sigo | Stranger In Town | City Lights | 2010
Elegant, whimsical. Checked humor. Clear attention to craft. A talented poet.
Christine Hume | Shot | Counterpath | 2010
Slowly building a surreal temple of exquisite disturbances. House Flies, Alaska, now the Night.
David Lespiau, trans. Keith Waldrop | Four Cut-ups, or The Case of the Restored Volume | Burning Deck | 2010
My mini-review here.
Leslie Scalapino | Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows | Starcherone | 2010
High art: imaginative and political. Her understanding of Time-In-The-Sentence is what makes the stories go.
Lissa Wolsak | Squeezed Light—Selected Poems 1994-2005 | Station Hill | 2010
Sublime writing. My review.
Jena Osman | The Network | Fence | 2010
Atmospheric realism of uncanny stitching. Surgical.
Eléna Rivera | Remembrance Of Things Plastic | LRLE | 2010
Graceful, ghostly, poetic memoir.
Various authors, ed. Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young | A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism | Chain Links | 2011
My mini-review here.
Nada Gordon | Ululations blog | Blogspot/Google | 2011
The raw, vital poetry.
Alta Ifland | Voice of Ice | Les Figues | 2007
Crystalline, carefully laid, prose poems.
Stephen Ratcliffe | [assorted daily poems] | Facebook | 2010-11
Fugue of viewing / sensing / intellecting.
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James Wagner is the author of the chapbooks Query/Xombies and Geisttraum (Esther Press, 2010), the short-story collection Work Book (Nothing Moments, 2007), and three poetry collections: Trilce (Calamari Press, 2006), After the Giraffes (Blazevox, 2005), and the false sun recordings (3rd bed, 2003). Wagner’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004. Back to 2011 directory.
Attention Span 2011 | Patrick Pritchett
Rachel Blau DuPlessis | Pitch: Drafts 77-95 | Salt | 2010
The penultimate volume to the now rapidly concluding Drafts. The angel of history (AKA midrash) is alive and kicking in these fantastically sculpted and minutely attentive poem-narratives. DuPlessis may have been all along creating a whole new genre here. This angel is the principle of continual poetic revision as intervention. It reads and writes the past not as it was, but as it is found: deeply fractured by contingency, open to an ongoing process of revision. The midrashic angel takes up its task not merely by bearing witness to what it sees, but through actively constructing new alignments of meaning from the scattered wreckage of the debris field. The highlights, for me, are “Draft 87-Trace Element,” and the already legendary “Draft 85-Hard Copy.” For more, see the feature on RBD in Jacket2.
William Corbett | The Whalen Poem | Hanging Loose | 2010
The maestro at the top of his game, swinging loose and easy—nothing to it. There’s a luxurious liberation coursing through this poem that abounds with grace notes and is overflowing with his customary generosity toward memory and experience, the sweet, raspy pellicles of detail, that is, finally, the history of a life, and of writing a life, inner and outer, moment by moment, and is deeply moving.
Forrest Gander | Core Samples from the World | New Directions | 2011
An itinerary of otherness, strewn with uncanny moments of tenderness and glancing blows that crack the fragility of conscience. The earth’s alien powder is sifted through, poured out, regathered in rich pulses of telluric current from the far side of everywhere. Poem, photo, and prose fold into and out of each other, remapping their own contours. The overlap and feedback amplifies into a kind of 21st Century global witness that is porous and humbling and weird. I can’t think of another book like it. Utterly extraordinary.
Christian Hawkey | Ventrakl | Ugly Duckling | 2011
Officially a tour de force, this is a magnificent accomplishment, one that completely mesmerized me. Hawkey has reinvented the gorgeous and tortured weirdness of Trakl for the 21st Century. More than that, he has carried the logic of the translator’s task forward into a region that is all “interpass, penetrate.” The cumulative effect, when read straight through (and it’s that rare book of poetry, almost impossible to put down), is—how to say this without sounding absurd?—one of the most precisely calibrated vulnerability. Reader, I was carried away.
Fanny Howe | Come and See | Greywolf | 2011
These poems are like messages from a skeptical clairvoyant. The sense of recognition here is humbling and amazing, like the call for justice contained in the simple gesture of saying “you are here.” Everything superfluous is stripped away and what’s left is haunting. “A Hymn” seems to sum up all her concerns and convictions. (Harry Lime as a mix of Paul Celan and Oscar Levant?) These poems insist on an order of seeing that is miraculous, like the movies, and where forgiveness is all about how we do the work of looking. Like a form of levitation, they will break your heart with clarity.
Sharon Howell | Girl in Everytime | Pressed Wafer | 2011
There’s a freshness and insouciance to these lyrical forays that balance the prosaic and the ordinary against the privileged and the secret. The effect overall is one of constant surprise and delight. Spicer, a presence here surely, as has been noted. But behind Spicer, Wordsworth—not the bloated, complacent Will.I.Am of the Preludes, but the swift, sharp gleaner of chthonic music and the joyous spookiness of being alive.
Andrew Joron | Trance Archive: Selected and New Poems | City Lights | 2010
Lines decrypted from a dark book, pitched to an arcane thrum, a holy thread of labyrinthine sound that interweaves the soul’s salt with the sugar of the tongue. In this divinatory praxis, Joron capitalizes on the generative slippages which govern the chance combinatory properties of language. Following the logic of paronomasia, the poems here teeter, at times, on the brink of decay, yet what rescues them is the commitment to the sublime yield of phonemic constellation and all the spaces, and nodes, of micrological difference that open up between each slip-gap, each meld-slide, within a horizon of negation and wonder. The gravity well of logos is mitigated only by the poem’s own negentropic counter-thrust.
Peter O’Leary | Luminous Epinoia | Cultural Society | 2010
A book of impossible risk and endless doxology: in the end, they are the same thing. Liturgical datastreams downloaded and uploaded continually, like the angels in Jacob’s Dream. Fervent and unabashedly naked in its declaration of poetic vision. It reduces to so much kitsch the weak ironies of slacker emo-whimsy emanating from Brooklyn or the timid affirmations of bourgeois pathos praised in the Sunday Times, both of which somehow pass for “spirit” in the late imperium. This is a poetics that dares and ratifies the visionary ratios of song. Written out of what Abraham Joshua Heschel called “spiritual audacity,” Luminous Epinoia is a hymn to the theophanic. This is poetry of vatic kerygma—pure proclamation.
Michael Palmer | Thread | New Directions | 2011
Simply put, his best work since At Passages. There’s a certain kind of reader who can’t get past Palmer’s apparent break from the heavily encrypted style of his earlier work. Narrow constructionists, they want every book to be Sun or Notes for Echo Lake. But the idiom he has been exactingly developing since 1988, a kind of theater of the neo-allegorical that juxtaposes the driest of satire with a messianic thirst for the impossible ur-sprach, continues what were always his deepest concerns. Here, they are brought to a vivid pitch in this delicate and powerful collection. Flashing with spiked barbs of humor, these poems still inhabit the melancholy landscape where language ratifies itself by signifying its own failure. Written under the sign of Saturn, they are harrowing in their humility and directness. Simplicity here is neither a reduction nor a retreat, but the earned complexity of a late style in a late hour. To call the title sequence a tour de force is to defame it. These “threads” are addresses, colloquies, homages, haunted questions that concentrate Palmer’s concerns for the art as a site for making counter-meanings, the micro-resistances that push back against the crushing sense of fatigue born of suffering and slaughter. This is elegy as crystalline paleography. Every word is merely on loan from the thief’s journal. They haunt the dream of memory with the hope for the Not-Yet.
Andrew Schelling | From the Arapaho Songbook | La Alameda | 2011
This may well be the best thing Schelling’s ever done. Superbly attentive to the discrete seams where language and geography ripple over and through each other, this is an initiation into another world—one that exists side by side with the everyday. These poems track pathways back and forth between the ancient and the contemporary, language and the natural, without ever sliding into the false a-historicism of the romantic. The care with words—guttural, elusive, probing, shamanic—and the handling of the line breaks—is deliciously deft and subtle. A beautifully wrought, intimate book.
Rosmarie Waldrop | Driven to Abstraction | New Directions | 2010
The title sequence is superb. Waldrop’s extraordinary constellation—beginning with “Zero or, the Opening Position”—reads like a history of the metaphysical comedy of negation, its failures and its hopes, as traced through everything from cosmology to monetary exchange. It is a poem about the manifold ways nothing is implicated in everything, whether the via negativa of Pseudo-Dionysus or the khora of Derrida. A recitation of zero and its history as a concept. Of its migration into the West from medieval Arabic mathematics and its subsequent role as a placeholder for the underlying, the foundational that is anti-foundational, “zero, the corrosive number,” as she calls it, without which nothing counts.
Elizabeth Willis | Address | Wesleyan | 2011
I heard Willis read “Blacklist” two years ago at MLA and it fairly took the top of my head off. In this poem, the legacy of the Salem witches is made over as a noble tradition of transgression, a powerful and ongoing voice of resistance to the state, the system, and the boss. Woody Guthrie was a witch! After the headiness of the dazzling Meteoric Flowers, the tune and turn of this collection digs deeper into the marrow of the word, refining down to nubs and particles, a process not to be confused with simplicity. To say the thing austerely turns out to be incredibly complicated.
Lissa Wolsak | Squeezed Light: Collected Poems 1994-2005 | Station Hill | 2010
The summa of an extraordinary ambition. If the stutter is the plot, then what to say of the hyphen, the line-break, the neologism reaching after a glimpse of fugitive cognition in a cascade of vowels? The fragment here becomes fragrant, imbued with a fragile knowing. The letter, atomized, becomes the law of spirit—darkened with matter, made radiant by it. It is by such carefully broken apart attentions that these poems stage extravagance as investigation. They generate a singing that both binds and unravels, spelling out a new form of orthography that makes the traces of the invisible not only legible, but achingly near to us.
Andrew Zawacki | Roche Limit | Tir Aux Pigeons | 2011
Laid out in four-line stanzas, each one marked by roughly four beats per line, this short, perfect poem surges forward in a compelling rhythm capable of surprising turns and reverberating with fractal resonances—the complex echo chamber of attractions and resistances as words slide through one another and into their own process of associative elision and repetition, a principle of rime, as Duncan might say, that recalls the innermost linguistic and ontological structures for mapping levels of relation.
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Patrick Pritchett is the author of several books of poems, including Burn, Antiphonal, and Salt, My Love. Recent projects include editing a feature on Rachel Blau DuPlessis for Jacket 2, a talk for MSA on Pound, Sobin, and the ruins of modernism, and a book project on the messianic turn in postwar poetry. He is currently a Lecturer in the History and Literature Program at Harvard University and Visiting Lecturer in Poetry at Amherst College. Pritchett’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009, 2008. Back to 2011 directory.
Attention Span 2010 – David Dowker
Will Alexander | The Sri Lankan Loxodrome | New Directions | 2009
Laynie Browne | The Desires of Letters | Counterpath | 2010
Mark Goldstein | Tracelanguage | BookThug | 2010
Karen Mac Cormack | Tale Light | BookThug / West House | 2010
Camille Martin | Sonnets | Shearsman | 2010
Steve McCaffery | Verse and Worse | Wilfrid Laurier University | 2010
Laura Moriarty | A Tonalist | Nightboat | 2010
Alice Notley | Reason and Other Women | Chax | 2010
Lisa Robertson | R’s Boat | California | 2010
Leslie Scalapino | Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows | Starcherone | 2010
Lissa Wolsak | Squeezed Light | Station Hill | 2010
More David Dowker here. His Attention Span for 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005. Back to directory.
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.
Third Factory/Notes to Poetry 
Attention Span 2011 | Peter Quartermain
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Robert Duncan , ed. Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman | The HD Book | California | 2011
At last! Even if you don’t like Duncan (and quite a few don’t), this is still not to be ignored. Its publication a major event of the year.
Tony Judt | Ill Fares the Land | Penguin | 2010
I lament his death, he’s irreplaceable. Not to heed his work, these essays, would be sheer folly.
Norma Cole | To Be At Music: Essays & Talks | Omnidawn | 2010
Brilliant, pithy, full of news.
George Bowering | My Darling Nelly Gray | Talonbooks | 2010
Bowering in top form.
Robert Pogue Harrison | The Body of Beatrice | Hopkins | 1988
An oldie but goodie, still opening doors.
Meredith Quartermain, drawings by Susan Bee | Recipes From the Red Planet | Book Thug | 2010
I’m not exactly impartial here, but hey, this is really a very interesting and indeed good book. The publisher calls it fiction; it’s more like poetry to me, and resourceful.
Lissa Wolsak | Squeezed Light: Collected Poems 1994-2005 | Station Hill | 2010
Dense, difficult, bracing—can I say these wide-ranging poems are obsessed with words? They’re sure instructive to anyone who cares about them, and really are exhilarating in their astonished thought.
Guy Birchard | Further Than The Blood | Pressed Wafer | 2010
This is Birchard’s sixth or maybe seventh book of poetry, but nobody seems to have noticed. Maybe his poems are too subtle and careful, perhaps the mode at casual glance too familiar, the skill too unobtrusive.
Michael Boughn | Cosmographia: A Post-Lucretian Micro-Epic | Book Thug | 2010
Issued in fascicles over the last few years, and at last collected together. Boughn is a terrific poet, who actually thinks as he writes. He can be very funny; sometimes he’s very angry. He’s always without fail interesting, so long as you’re paying attention.
Stéphane Mallarmé, trans. Barbara Johnson | Divagations: The Author’s 1897 Arrangement | Belknap / Harvard | 2007
Delighted to find this still in print.
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Peter Quartermain has just (July 2011) submitted “Poetic Fact,” a collection of his essays, to an interested publisher. His edition of Robert Duncan’s Collected Early and Collected Later Poems and Plays is currently at the U of California P. The introduction to the first volume appeared in The Capilano Review, Fall 2009.
Quartermain’s Attention Span for 2010, 2008, 2006. Back to 2011 directory.
Written by Steve Evans
October 17, 2011 at 11:10 am
Posted in Attention Span 2011, Commented List
Tagged with George Bowering, Guy Birchard, Lissa Wolsak, Meredith Quartermain, Michael Boughn, Norma Cole, Peter Quartermain, Robert Duncan, Robert Pogue Harrison, Stéphane Mallarmé, Tony Judt, Victor Coleman