Panda
Like any good conceptual work, the description of Panda (KFP) by Chris Alexander can be taken at its website-word: Two and a half years in the making, this book-length poem assembles thousands of fan responses, brief summaries and descriptions of the title character from DreamWorks…
Amnesiac
…I am a word full of E’s —a cool porcelain bell, a spore, a briny rusted lock, a passing scab, an errant cell turning. —“self portrait (with vial & corn tash)” How can one respond to the trauma of global violence? Written against the backdrop…
Lifer
The less I think I know about a poet, the better the chance I’ll take to the book, as long as I can work out what I’m looking at and sail between oh that and I don’t get it. (Sometimes I like the comforts of…
Whismy :: Horror :: Prudence
Click HERE for a PDF review of 3 Nightboat books: The Book of Interfering Bodies by Daniel Borzutzky lucky coat anywhere by Michael Burkard Discipline by Dawn Lundy Martin
Kenning Editions: Pamela Lu’s Ambient Parking Lot and Tan Lin’s Insomnia and the Aunt
Two new releases by Chicago-based Kenning Editions take on ambience as a central motif. Pamela Lu’s Ambient Parking Lot documents the various transformations of a fictitious music group that creates demos out of parking lot sounds, while Tan Lin’s Insomnia and the Aunt is touted…
P.O.T.I.C.H.E. or Poetry Of The Immanent Corpus Hers Eternal
Click HERE for a PDF review of P.O.T.I.C.H.E.
Saint Erasure
Despite currents of panic and loss flowing through Saint Erasure, this book manifests quietly. It has the feeling of speech performed by a solitary speaker in an abandoned picnic shelter overlooking the sea. If you have driven any stretch of U.S. coastal highway you know…
Thread by Michael Palmer (New Directions, 2011) and American Fanatics by Dorothy Barresi (Pitt Poetry Series, 2010)
Testing. Palmer Barresi review, Akron to Woodstock to Ossining, April 2011. Michael Palmer’s new book Thread like all of his books since the three book cycle collected in Codes Appearing (Notes, First Figure, Sun) attempts to do for paraphrasable meaning what he did in those…
the new black
If your mother or father or the wolf what raised you fulfilled her or his or its obligation to make you fit for civilized company, she or he or it taught you not to be a show-off, a braggart, a gloater. Of course, if whoever…
The Girl Without Arms
Brandon Shimoda’s The Girl Without Arms (Black Ocean 2010) speaks with a spiritual intensity driven by intuitive pressures to probe through vestiges of family history and the immediate geographic/emotional locations of composition. The resulting book constructs an image, in infrared, of Shimoda’s consciousness. The dominant…
Money Shot
There is great and there is graceful. One does not always lead to or implicate the other, and there is the danger of de trop in both. For that matter, a poet should not be great, for greatness, or, for that matter, grace, can only…
The Wide Road
On the Road’s last long sentence concludes the novel with the (in)famous “scoping” from external observation to internal reflection created by Kerouac’s breath-taking spontaneous prose: So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long,…