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 2010 – Nada Gordon

Stan Apps | Universal Stories with Unknown Particulars | valeveil e-book | 2009

A work of conscience and searching thought: What does poetry do in the world? What does it do for us?

Lynn Berhrendt | petals, emblems | Lunar Chandelier | forthcoming 2010

My blurb: “The affect-drenched poems in Lynn Behrendt’s Petals/Emblems leap off beauty’s edge right on to the electrified grid of being: that difficult ‘barrage/ of having been born/ at all.’ There (here) everything’s objective correlative: love and pain ‘crave form like alms’ and surely find it, sensuous, phonic, and unsettling, ‘heavy’ with ‘gyn grief’ and ‘undaunted desire.’ ‘This ache to tell you something’ shoots the poems through with yearny rhetorical force like the ‘inward arch’ of ‘nostalgic ocean’: palpable, fluid, engulfing.”

Charles Bernstein | All the Whiskey in Heaven | Farrar | 2010

Do I even need to say why?

Brandon Brown | The Orgy | self-published | 2010

I wrote on Ululations that this book “… spreads a metaphorical net onto the orgy of late capitalism in the hyper-information age (‘this crystal mall must be destroyed’); and most compellingly, to me, it seems to refer back on itself to the orgy of writing that makes itself felt in every moment of this galvanized, kind of emo (in the best possible sense: ‘My heart struggles./ It’s big as a chard, but it never learns.’) poem.”

K. Lorraine Graham | Terminal Humming | Edge | 2009

I blurbed this one, too. [All “this shining and this _utter [!].” Terminal Humming is a very exciting book and I love it. Eavesdropping and borrowing from diverse discourses, K. Lorraine Graham has created a complex “essay on scrounging.” It is a wonderfully violent “attempt to unleash inner badness” in poems that are hot and audacious, in a girly way: “Wonder Woman boots twirl twirl.” Terminal Humming is just the right amount of weird. In it, “kinks become beautiful and obvious,” and “language [hums] as angry form.” Read this “downwind chess urine bird bathing extravaganza” of a book!]

Michael Gottlieb | Memoir and Essay | Faux | 2010

A moving, witty, precise and somewhat theatricalized bildungsroman. How he got this way.

Carla Harryman | Adorno’s Noise | Essay | 2008

Like psychedelics for the intellect.

Rodney Koeneke | Etruria | manuscript

Exquisite. Someone please publish this. This is poetry exuding the most poignant possible elegance.

K. Silem Mohammad | Sonnagrams 1-20 | Slack Buddha | 2010

Don’t be surprised if you find yourself ROLLING ON THE FLOOR LAUGHING upon reading these poems. Seriously. Kasey is my idol.

Mel Nichols | Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon | Edge | 2009

Mindbogglingly delicate and audacious, all at once.

Lanny Quarles | chapbooks

He sent us an envelope of chapbooks which I loved. Gary squirreled them away somewhere so I can’t check titles. Endlessly inventive!

Ariana Reines |The Cow | Fence | 2006

I know I’m late to this one, but wow, The Cow. She packs a punch.

Monica de le Torre | Public Domain | Roof | 2008

It’s conceptual! It’s funny! It’s whip-smart! It’s art!

Dana Ward |Typing Wild Speech | Summer BF Press | 2010

All the outspilling radiance of life and death here, like a pop Proust or a more-beatific-than Kerouac Kerouac.

PLUS: live computer-facilitated performances of Danny Snelson (“Mabuse”) and Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford (“The Ballad of the Death of Spring”) Why limit ourselves to the page? This is a future of poetry.

More Nada Gordon here. Her Attention Span for 2005. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2009 – Melanie Neilson

Stacy Doris | Cheerleader’s Guide to the World | Roof Books | 2006

Classic texts over the top Mayan, Tibetan, New Jerseyan for the reader-gamer. Also enjoyed re-reading Doris’ Knot, Conference, and Paramour recently.

Manny Farber | Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies | Da Capo Press | 1998

“this exciting shake-up movie is made up in progressive segments, each one having a different stylistic format, from fixed camera close-up of a comic-porno episode (‘…and then she sat in a saucer of milk…’) through the very Hawkslike eye-level dollying past a bumper- to-bumper tie-up on the highway…”

Rob Fitterman | Rob the Plagiarist | Roof Books | 2009

Brilliant. Conceptual Mardi Gras and the big hijack extraordinaire.

Benjamin Friedlander | American Poetry in the Age of Whitman and Dickinson | Blog |  2009

Ben’s findings, archiving and overflow “on their way to a book” give immense reading pleasure. I’m staying tuned to read what BF has to say on how keyword searching has changed our relationship to literature, redefining “canonicity.”

Nada Gordon | Folly | Roof | 2007

I laughed, I cried, I came, I went, I like it, I like it, I like it.

Jane Grigson | Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book | Antheneum | 1982

Apple strudel to watermelon sherbet, recipes plain and fancy for forty-six different fruits. Rediscovered and reunioned with this book in June, on blueberry stained pages is a favorite berry pie recipe (adapted from Elizabeth Lambert Ortiz’s Mango Pie), poetry of lowbush and highbush blueberries.

Jessica Grim | Vexed | Online from ubu editions since 2002; recently published in print by BlazeVox | 2009

Brian Kim Stefans: “sensual reverie with documentary relevance. The musicality of Grim’s poems is understated, the words delicately gathered, such that the poems occasionally seem given over to indeterminacy and chance, but in fact each one has a formal perfection that illustrates an underlying lyrical integrity.” Amen.

Todd MacCarthy | Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood | Grove Press | 1997

The engineer as poet. Started reading this after weeks of watching HH pictures with my sons in our family Movie Club. McCarthy focuses with great and admirable detail on the films. Fresh discussions of overlapping dialogue in the romantic comedies though ultimately I enjoyed Joseph McBride’s Hawks on Hawks more.

John Ruskin | The Poetry of Architecture | Wily and Sons | 1873

“Shelley has caught the feeling finely the house is penetrated to its corners by the insolence of the day”. More reading about “negative space” this time in the chapter about Giotto and his works in Padua.

Kim Rosenfield | re: evolution, with an introduction by Sianne Ngai | Les Figues | 2008

There will be repercussions after reading this book. I really like the noirish spawning and smooth switcherooing in technique and style. Tabula rasa/Population cage/Withstanding the wear and tear of modern “tempos”/Natural heredity of the body/Inheriting the wisdom/Of people who’ve never met in the first place.

More Melanie Neilson here.