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Poetry. "You've stumbled upon the best travelogue you'll ever find...a book for the ages, and for our age and place." Laura Kasischke "The tag-team poetry of Buckley and Ott is as much a kin to the works of John Ashbery and Edward Field as it is to the radio skits of George Burns and Gracie Allen. Their euphonious cacophony of wordplay, ingenious turn-of-phrase concoctions, and steady stream of pop/cross-cultural references create an erudite mix of levelheaded nonsense and harebrained smarts." Paul Fericano "John F. Buckley and Martin Ott are extremely talented poets, schooled in their craft, who are already well on their way to the 'A List' of their generation, and are thought by many myself included to be there already. This comprehensive collection will be on the shelves and in the hands of those readers who endeavor to chart the course of poetic art in our time." Gerald Locklin"
"The first anthology of contemporary Brooklyn poets" --
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Named the Best First Book of poems for the year, this collection by Joe Pan was short-listed for the Yale Younger Poets prize, the National Poetry Series, and the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award, offering its readers a 'language [that] is striking nearly perfect.' Joe grew up along the Space Coast of Florida and attended the Iowa Writers Workshop. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Man on extremely small island is a collection of poems in four sections. The sections follows the seasons. The poems in the first section urge a movement outward (a "spring motion"), and are generally exuberant, hopeful, inclusive and comic. This movement swells into the summer of "Open Sky," section II, the most broadly confident poem in the book, typified by the "blue" outro in which the speaker, a "blue monk in a blue train," sails for a transcendent "blue country" filled with a "blue kind." Section III, fall, finds the speaker in a rut, isolated in a closed space (apartment, coffee shop, extremely small island), trapped in a repetitive cycle of days - a "life of facsimile," as "Self-Reproduction with Scream Pillow" puts it. In "Bon Chul Koo and the Hall of Fame," section IV, the speaker is back in his car again but this time with his father; the movement is not forward as in "Open Sky" but backward, as the speaker moves spatially back toward his childhood home in Cleveland (stopping in the culturally backward region of Cooperstown) as well as temporally back through Korean family history and his memories of growing up.
Poetry. "Few poets have the ability to record the gossamer strands of their own cognitions as Jackie Clark does. The poems in APHORIA are miraculous in the way they map a topology of quotidian thought in unassuming yet radiant language. APHORIA is something like a blueprint for the invisible architecture of the human soul. Not so much the soul that belongs to Jackie Clark, but the one that belongs to and connects all of us." Ben Mirov "APHORIA constellates fragments of memory, cityscape, images, & imaginings into serial poems both contemplative & seductive. It draws the reader into an embrace. Through this, the book develops an epistemology of gravity, of holding, countered by the inevitable failure to accurately remember being held. These hushed & biting lyrics are centripetal, circling the arcane core of a person's experience." Mathias Svalina "Jackie Clark's poetics is a poetics of spying on the prismatic philosophical underpinnings of fate. We live and love in her hopes and surrenders." Jenny Boully"
The debut collection of poetry by Anaïs Duplan.
Poetry. Here is a calendar full of long shadows, a guidebook of unlikely bursts of music, and we couldn't ask for a better guide than this keenly perceptive, wry, plucky poet. In Laurie Filipelli's ELSEPLACE, as in Keats, we may not know if we wake or dream but that uncertain state blurs nothing, rather it clarifies the mysteries that are our befuddlements and salvations.--Dean Young In Laurie Filipelli's debut collection, lyrical prose poems that evoke the sorrows of the calendar year are juxtaposed with feisty odes that soar and float and sing and refuse to be tethered. Elsewhere could be anywhere, but ELSEPLACE is brilliant and magical. It's where the cat's been when it reappears, it's a ...
Poetry. "Harel writes with such grace, lacing his preoccupations with such a light touch of humor, that you often forget THE BODY DOUBLE is cut from the same big questions that keep us all up at night. If you've strayed from poetry, this is the book that will bring you back. If you've ever secretly wished that Kafka had been an optimist, this is the poet for you." Tea Obreht "With mischievous appreciation for the human dilemma, THE BODY DOUBLE charts the adventures of a rebellious, canny self within the self, and in doing so offers an imaginative perspective on both the classic doppelganger and the contemporary fascination with identity. These charming ontological poems suggest our myopia an...
Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Rejecting the purely lyrical mode and its attendant melancholia, the poems in Lunch Portraits attempt to beat back existential dread by reveling in the delightfully banal totems of mass American culture hot dogs, cinema, cats, money, youth, selfies. They eat their way through exuberance and fear, richness and emptiness, belonging and alienation, locating in the everyday what is human and hopelessly hungry. Yet in this search for satiation, they also stumble upon the vexing paradoxes inherent in this desire, where no insecurity is entirely innocuous. These poems are alive with appetite and yearning, always hopeful to discover, as Kuan writes, "the 'help' button of the burning telephone."