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No Shape Bends the River So Long
WINNER OF THE NEW MEASURE POETRY PRIZE, Selected by CAROLYN FORCHÉ | Free Verse Editions, edited by Jon Thompson | “What to make of this grand experiment over months and miles of river by two poets, not one—Monica Berlin and Beth Marzoni—plus whatever third spirit they’ve invented together? Like music from the 8th century written by Anonymous, that haunting ubiquitous voice, these poems feel unsettlingly interchangeable, keep coming like the country’s longest river dream-documented here in a rich rush, dense with repetition and sorrow by poets who ‘think like a glacier or a stone, sand . . . years / like consistent rain.’ The Mississippi never had better companions or more devoted ones, save Mark Twain perhaps, or more to the point, his troubled, star-crossed Huck. The sense of human and nonhuman history, even prehistory stuns, keeps bothering this shared-solitary work. ‘Wake to any weather & know that / long ago there also was.’ I’ll take that as rare solace.” —MARIANNE BORUCH
Split the Crow
“The poems of Sarah Sousa’s Split the Crow employ archaeology as a means of giving voice not only to the land, but to long-gone peoples. We discover the objects that individuals were equipped with for their final journeys, as well as witnessing their tales. Sousa’s work picks up where conventional history has left off, giving voice to urgent testimonies. ‘The Lost People,’ states, ‘On the train coming east, / not knowing what else to do, boys sang / the death songs our warriors sang riding into battle,’ just one of many instances where Native American accounts find a ready home in Sousa’s poetry. Split the Crow is a collection of tremendous magnitude that calls upon the past as a way to reconsider our present moment.” —Mary Biddinger
Condominium of the Flesh
A darkly humorous exploration of the human body and its various functions in poetic prose, Valerio Magrelli’s The Condominium of the Flesh, a personal chronicle of his clinical experience, catalogues a life history of ailments without ever being pathological.
The Republic of Song
The Republic of Song is a journey to discover the place of that name, moving through abhorrence to vision. The political chicanery of barely believable figures is excoriated and set against a world where Orpheus holds sway, friendship outstares death, Nina Simone is happy and Jack Spicer sends us a message about daddy Zeus president. In The Republic of Song everything is changed and the lyric states its claim in the face of exile. The Republic of Song is also that place where having a drink with a friend in a bar in Brussels can unlock part of the story and prompt the freedom of seeing things for what they are. In the conclusive poem, “The Museum of the Sea,” the supposedly distant past is alive in the present and deep time is now, Odysseus is at sea with the victims of the migrant crisis, everything is new and nothing is new.
Sunshine Wound
Free Verse Editions, Edited by Jon Thompson | “While the poems in this alert collection rarely depend on specific geography, there is a strong sense of somewhere here. These poems catch the mind in the process of thinking and plot the subtle constellations that arise from the intersection between the actual and the imaginary. Shades and tones and moods are evoked, as we might find in the paintings many of these poems reference. And yet, there are quiet echoes of our real world of human endeavor to provide a sense that something’s out-of-whack as well as the sense there’s something vital to hope for. This is a deeply satisfying book.” —Maurice Manning
Summoned
The sixteenth of the twenty-five major works of Guillevic published by Gallimard since 1942, Summoned (Requis) represents a pivotal moment in his oeuvre and reaffirms his position as an essential and compelling voice in contemporary poetry. A long poem composed of short, lapidary verse that the poet calls quanta, each in itself a miniature poem, Requis distils familiar themes and motifs of the Guillevician universe within an expanded vision encompassing the outer reaches of space. Within this poetic hurly burly at once totalising and fragmented, arboreal and rhizomatic, cadenced and discontinuous, expansive and condensed, there is a summons to bear witness to the human condition while heeding the injunction of ‘notre toucher/De l’illimité’ that seeks to transgress the boundaries of knowledge, to abolish the dichotomies of presence and absence, motion and stillness, word and silence.
Spool
By turns skeptical and ecstatic, musical and sprung, Spool is a formally adventuresome love poem to marriage, language, parenting and illness in the early 21st century.
Pilgrimage Suites
Reading itself is travel in Derek Gromadzki’s first book, Pilgrimage Suites, an outing across an insular medieval landscape as rich in its registers of language as in its flora or fauna. This book is neither history nor story, though it retains characteristics of each. Like history, it perpetuates retrograde speculation while maintaining the narrated sequencing of incident that is the common stock and trade of story. In the heyday of medieval pilgrimages, English underwent radical changes. The Latinate speech of Church officialdom ran roughly up against a vernacular with deep Germanic and Brythonic roots. These suites track an imagined journey over the landscape that staged the violence of...
Bear Down, Bear North
In her debut collection, Melinda Moustakis brings to life a rough-and-tumble family of Alaskan homesteaders through a series of linked stories. Born in Alaska herself to a family with a homesteading legacy, Moustakis examines the near-mythological accounts of the Alaskan wilderness that are her inheritance and probes the question of what it means to live up to larger-than-life expectations for toughness and survival. The characters in Bear Down, Bear North are salt-tongued fishermen, fisherwomen, and hunters, scrappy storytellers who put themselves in the path of destruction—sometimes a harsh snowstorm, sometimes each other—and live to tell the tale. While backtrolling for kings on the K...
System and Population
Christopher Sindt’s System and Population returns to the primary theme of Sindt’s earlier collection, The Bodies: the impact of human desire on the natural world. System and Population focuses on the proposed damming of the American River canyon in northern California—working with source texts such as geologic studies, government documents, and the diaries of gold miners—to study the intersections of personal experience, scientific study, and the politics of rivers and dams. It is a personal eco-poetics that embraces the tradition of the lyric, experimenting with collage and the explicit inclusion of historic and scientific data. System and Population meditates on human experiences, such as parenthood and loss, and also studies the dissociative effects of environmental damage and disaster
