LITMIR.BIZ

<P>In this nuanced and moving new collection of poems, Brenda Coultas weaves a meditation on contemporary life and our place in it. Coultas, who is known for her investigative documentary approach, turns her attention to landfills and the odd histories embedded in the materials found there. The poems make their home among urban and rural detritus, waste, trinkets, and found objects. The title poem, for example, takes its cue from the random, often perfect, pigeon feathers found on city streets. In a seamless weave of poetic sentences, The Tatters explores how our human processes of examination are often bound up with destruction. These poems enable us to be present with the sorrow and horror of our destructive nature, and to honor the natural world while acknowledging that this world no longer exists in any pure form, calling to us instead from cracks in the sidewalk, trash heaps, and old objects. Check for the online reader's companion at tatters.site.wesleyan.edu.</P>

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<P>Rae Armantrout's poetry comprises one of the most refined and visionary bodies of work written over the last forty years. These potent, compact meditations on our complicated times reveal her observant sensibility, lively intellect, and emotional complexity. This generous volume charts the evolution of Armantrout's mature, stylistically distinct work. In addition to 25 new poems, there are selections from her books Up To Speed, Next Life, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award winning volume Versed, Money Shot, Just Saying, and Itself. Including some of her most brilliant pieces, Partly affirms Armantrout's reputation as one of our sharpest and most innovative writers.</P>

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<P>The distinguished poet Harvey Shapiro passed away on January 7, 2013. The poems in this book, many of them previously unpublished and discovered only after his death, are a great gift, and the final confirmation of his extraordinary talent. Edited by Shapiro's literary executor, the poet and critic Norman Finkelstein, these last poems bear an unprecedented gravitas, and yet they are as supple, jazzy, and edgy as Shapiro's earlier work. All the themes for which he is known are beautifully represented here. There are poems of his experiences in World War II, the erotic life, and of daily moments in Brooklyn and Manhattan, all in search of a worldly wisdom and grace that the poet calls «a momentary glory.» As Shapiro tells us, the poem «Is an Egyptian / ship of the dead, / everything required / for life stored / in its hold.» The book includes an introduction by the editor.</P>

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<P>The Book of Landings brings together the second and third parts of Mark McMorris's visionary trilogy «Auditions for Utopia,»—initiated in Entrepôt—and marks two stages in the evolution of the poet's conception of space. The first stage of the collection is the entrepôt, a space where disparate vectors of identity congregate, come into conflict, and finally merge into hybrid forms. The poetry follows a trajectory of diaspora, or exile, instigated by conquest, colonialism, wars, and political defeat in the search for Utopia. In The Book of Landings the promised dwelling has been removed from the realm of physical geography, and there is only transition—fragmentary episodes of arrival and departure, in transit from one entrepôt to another. These episodes of transit do not only compose a linear sequence only. Instead, they define a space or surface marked by repeated traversals over time—tracings and, importantly, re-tracings, by explorers, conquerors, migrants, merchants, slaves, refugees, and exiles—a city of palimpsests. An online reader's companion will be available at markmcmorris.site.wesleyan.edu.</P>

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<P>What do «self» and «it» have in common? In Rae Armantrout's new poems, there is no inert substance. Self and it (word and particle) are ritual and rigmarole, song-and-dance and long distance call into whatever dark matter might exist. How could a self not be selfish? Armantrout accesses the strangeness of everyday occurrence with wit, sensuality, and an eye alert to underlying trauma, as in the poem «Price Points» where a man conducts an imaginary orchestra but «gets no points for originality.» In their investigations of the cosmically mundane, Armantrout's poems use an extraordinary microscopic lens—even when she's glancing backwards from the outer reaches of space. An online reader's companion is available at http://raearmantrout.site.wesleyan.edu.</P>

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<P><B>Winner of the Griffin Poetry Trust's International Poetry Prize (2014)</B><BR><B>Runner-up for the Northern California Book Reviewers Northern California Book Award (2014)</B></P><P>Fire— its physical, symbolic, political, and spiritual forms—is the fourth and final subject in Brenda Hillman's masterful series on the elements. Her previous volumes—Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water—have addressed earth, air, and water. Here, Hillman evokes fire as metaphor and as event to chart subtle changes of seasons during financial breakdown, environmental crisis, and street movements for social justice; she gathers factual data, earthly rhythms, chants to the dead, journal entries, and lyric fragments in the service of a radical animism. In the polyphony of Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, the poet fuses the visionary, the political, and the personal to summon music and fire at once, calling the reader to be alive to the senses and to re-imagine a common life. This is major work by one of our most important writers. Check for the online reader's companion at brendahillman.site.wesleyan.edu.</P>

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<P>The poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko made his debut in underground magazines in the late Soviet period, and developed an elliptic, figural style with affinities to Moscow metarealism, although he lived in what was then Leningrad. Endarkenment brings together revisions of selected translations by Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova from his previous American titles, long out of print, with translations of new work carried out by Genya Turovskaya, Bela Shayevich, Jacob Edmond, and Eugene Ostashevsky. This chronological arrangement of Dragomoshchenko's writing represents the heights of his imaginative poetry and fragmentary lyricism from perestroika to the time of his death. His language—although «perpetually incomplete» and shifting in meaning—remains fresh and transformative, exhibiting its roots in Russian Modernism and its openness to the poet's Language School contemporaries in the United States. The collection is a crucial English introduction to Dragomoshchenko's work. It is also bilingual, with Russian texts that are otherwise hard to obtain. It also includes a foreword by Lyn Hejinian, an essay on how the poetry reads in Russian, a biography, and a list of publications. Check for the online reader's companion at endarkenment.site.wesleyan.edu.</P>

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