LITMIR.BIZ

Wilson writes from the periphery of an open field in this extended investigation into longing and loss, love and doubt.  As the poet muses, «we wonder / what we're not / in the field,» and reading The Hundred Grasses, we are made to wonder as much about what exists within us as how we’re shaped by what we lack. For Wilson, the act of looking can animate what is seemingly static. Stillness becomes not absence but fullness. These poems shape sounds culled from the empty spaces they inhabit, giving sense to life's silences.In the author’s words:I am interested in locating my poems’ subjects within the midst of open space and exploring the tensions that arise from this positioning. I am drawn to the struggle between foreground and background, as well as the foggy median (or prohibitive hedge) that serves to locate my subjects’ thrust. My poems are rooted in the flatlands and lowlands: the Midwestern lawns, lakes, fields, and creeks of my childhood, and the Dutch farms, canals, and seascapes near my family's home in Holland. Much of my poetry focuses on those instances when a space exerts itself beyond recognition, when it seems to estrange itself so that it may be renegotiated. For me this is a process of embedding my examination in the musicality of language and paying close attention to the breath of a line.

Подробнее

Moving from the mundane to the profound, first through observation of fact and matter, then shifting perspective, engaging a deeper sense of self, these poems re-imagine things great and small, making us care deeply about the world around us. In this cultivated and intricately crafted collection, Sally Keith shows the self as a crucible of force—that which compels us to exert ourselves upon the world, and meanwhile renders us vulnerable to it. Force by which a line unfurls—as in Robert Smithson’s colossal Spiral Jetty—or leads with forward motion—a train hurdling along the west-reaching railroad; Edweard Muybridge’s photographic reels charting animal and human locomotion. With poems remarkable in their clarity, captivating in their matter-of-factness, Keith examines the impossible and inevitable privacy of being a person in the world, meanwhile negotiating an inexorable pull toward the places we call home—one we alternately try and fail to resist.

Подробнее

In poems brilliantly textured and layered, Salgado Maranhão integrates socio-political thought with subjects abstractly metaphysical. Concrete collides with conceptual—butcher shops, sex, and machine guns in conversation with language, absence, and time—resulting in a collection varied as well as unified, an aesthetic at once traditional and postmodern. Writing in forms both fixed and free, Maranhão’s language suggests a jazz-like musicality that rings true in Alexis Levitin’s masterful translations. For readers who enjoy the complexity of Charles Simic, or the stylistically innovative syntax of César Vallejo, Maranhão’s Blood of the Sun is a sensually provocative amalgamation of both.

Подробнее

In her accomplished second collection of poems, Katrina Vandenberg writes from the intersection of power and forgiveness. With poems named for letters of the Phoenician alphabet, and employing such innovative forms as the ancient ghazal, Vandenberg deciphers the seemingly indecipherable in this extraordinary becoming of self through language. Moving between the physical and the abstract, the individual and the collective, Alphabet Not Unlike the World unearths meaning—with astonishing beauty—from the pain of loss and separation.“A deeply confident, compelling voice, with strong music, originality, and flow. I wanted to go wherever it went. Passionate with a keen sense of surprise, these poems are funny, serious, and wise all at once. Bravo.” —Naomi Shihab Nye

Подробнее

The distilled, haunting, and subtly complex poems in Adam Clay’s A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World often arrive at that moment when solitude slips into separation, when a person suddenly realizes he can barely see the place he set out from however long ago. He now sees he must find his connection back to the present, socially entangled world in which he lives. For Clay, reverie can be a siren’s song, luring him to that space in which prisoners will begin “to interrogate themselves.”Clay pays attention to the poet’s return to the world of his daily life, tracking the subtly shifting tenors of thought that occur as the landscape around him changes. Clay is fully aware of the difficulties of Thoreau’s “border life,” and his poems live somewhere between those of James Wright and John Ashbery: they seek wholeness, all the while acknowledging that “a fragment is as complete as thought can be.” In the end, what we encounter most in these poems is a generous gentleness–an attention to the world so careful it’s as if the mind is “washing each grain of sand.”

Подробнее

The poems in Black Dog, Black Night highlight an aspect of Vietnamese verse previously unfamiliar to American readers: its remarkable contemporary voices. Celebrating Vietnam’s diverse and thriving literary culture, the poems collected here combine elements of French Romanticism, Russian Expressionism, American Modernism, and native folk stories into a Vietnamese poetic tradition marked by vivid imagery, powerful emotions, and inventive forms. Included here are 17 postmodern and experimental Vietnamese poets, including the founding editor of Skanky Possum magazine, as well as American poets of Vietnamese descent.

Подробнее

In her highly anticipated new collection, Deborah Keenan sifts through inanimate objects and forgotten memories in search of personal validation. Her journal-like confessions create an instant bond with the reader, yet these seemingly simple poems daringly redefine common language. Keenan skillfully twists words to suit her ends, creating a colorful, dream-like world filled with lions, paintings, wars, and mummies. Throughout, she constantly reorganizes this world in an effort to realize her place in it.

Подробнее

Christopher Howell’s haunted and haunting collection, Gaze, is a book of counterpoints, swinging between moments of delicate connection (touching a girl’s wrist) and striking brutality (a boy slamming a just-caught fish against a boat’s stern to kill it “as he was taught”). Howell explores how our interior and exterior lives are entangled—the past living on inside us as we live inside the physical world that surrounds us—and he reminds us particularly of how loss releases us into the present, how in the process of living, “everybody pays.”Gaze is divided into three sections, focusing successively on the objective world, the world of inner life, and finally on the «other world» of the imagination and alternate reality. The author speaks through his own voice as well as the voices of other characters, ghosts, and creatures. Shifting between lyric and narrative poetry, the many voices come together to question and explore our perception of the world. While many similarly ambitious books unwisely set out to stake a claim on wisdom, however, these poems proceed incrementally and with humility—and thus, through their quiet and careful examinations, offer a far greater kind of wisdom.

Подробнее

In her stunning debut poetry collection, What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?, Arlene Kim confronts the ways in which language mythologizes memory and, thus, exiles us from our own true histories. Juxtaposing formal choices and dreamlike details, Kim explores the entangled myths that accompany the experience of immigration—the abandoned country known only through stories, the new country into which the immigrant family must wander ever deeper, and the numerous points where these narratives intertwine.Sharing ground with Randall Jarrell’s later poems, and drawing on a dizzying array of sources—including Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Korean folklore, Turkish proverbs, Paul Celan, Anna Akhmatova, Antonin Dvorak’s letters, and the numerous fictions we script across the inscrutabilities of the natural world—Kim reveals how a homesickness for the self is universal. It is this persistent and incurable longing that drives us as we make our way through the dark woods of our lives, following what might or might not be a trail of breadcrumbs, discovering, finally, that “we are the only path.”

Подробнее

"Amanda Nadelberg's poems . . . are jumping, funny, romantic, and frequently lyrical….which in the immediate reading is almost pure music."—Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly From «Matson»: So what patent reason is there to doubtthe color of a person's hair, there is sunand timpani. Rubber wood bone silkhemp or ivory I will cut my own in Junebut in May endured the next yesterdayI've already now forgotten what all themen I'll ever know smelled like. Maybedevotion on the beach in the middle ofthe week which is dumbed down withplanets imagining song.

Подробнее