Joyelle McSweeney

Pink Noise is a must-have one-off, a self-published, literally plastic, literally transparent volume turned out in hot pink and black ink by post-modern semi-expat Taiwanese poet Hsia Yü. Hsia Yü’s deadpan, nimble poetry is increasingly anthologized here in America, and may be consumed in large…

With the figure of the fugue at its heart, Catherine Meng’s addicting, reiterative Tonight’s the Night explores art’s ability to arrest time and subsume both precedence and subsequence into its revisitable, expansive present tense. It’s a mighty debut and a neat bit of prestidigitation, too….

To gather a frame of reference for Daniel Tiffany’s critical and creative output, one could begin with the list of illustrations to his 2000 volume on the lyric, Toy Medium. This list includes "1. Von Kempelen’s chess player," ,"2. Mechanical birds," "5. Hans Bellmer, drawing…

Back when this review was just a gleam in your reporter’s eye, a brouhaha was, well, brewing on Ron Silliman’s blog. Silliman praised Jessica Smith’s Organic Furniture Cellar for its "ambition," calling it "the most important book of 2006," and this brought about a predictable…

If the screaming red hue of USA Today‘s colorcoded weathermap is any indication, the dog days of summer have set in early across the lower 48. But fear not, swelterers: to every season there is a poetry book. The heat-fatigued and heart-woozy can kill the…

Almost 150 years after the release of Paris Spleen, subtitled Petits po’mes en prose and agreed by most opinionators to be the early landmark of the form, Baudelaire still offers the best definitions of the prose poem going (excluding the endlessly applicable "I know it…

Stephen Spender may have thought (and continually!) of those who were truly great but I think pretty frequently of those who get things going. Which brings us to Jackson Mac Low’s posthumous verb of a collection, Doings. If you and your list-servmates can drum up…

The title Strange Elegies both says it all and hardly enough about this indispensably disturbing volume. Indeed, Mac Wellman’s new book includes fourteen long, enjambed, frequently centered thingamajigs made out of words and orthographical markings that look like lyrics and are titled to recall elegies,…

Perhaps you have been following the recent folderol surrounding Flarf, its adherents and its discontents, in the blogs, list-servs and electronic journals. Those of you coming late to this party may view a cache of origin myths and working definitions on the EPC site. There,…

In preparing my review of Yunte Huang’s Cribs last month, I went out of my way to consider the book’s layout and non-verbal textual markings in developing a reading of the book as a whole. I credited Huang-the-author for the distinctive irregular stripes running up…