You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
'Big-Eyed Afraid' is a fast-paced, breathlessly witty and illuminating riff on the multiple effects of race, sex, biology and social pressure on who we are and how we see ourselves. Dawson's dazzling rhymes, her perfect pitch for an array of idioms ranging from the smutty to the sacred, and her extraordinary combination of metrical control and jazz-like syntactical elaboration make her work feel at one and the same time chiselled and improvised, traditional and utterly distinct. Brilliantly alert to multiple influences yet irreducibly tied to this particular poet at this particular moment in our collective history, Big-Eyed Afraid is one of the most compelling and entertaining books of poetr...
Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Winner of the 15th annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, judged by Edward Hirsch. CLUB Q is a book of mid-American yearning for both exceptionalism and belonging. Beginning as a coming-out narrative, the poems track the story of a gay boy growing up in Colorado Springs, under the spectres of the U.S. military, megachurch Christianity, and chain-restaurant capitalism. As the speaker ages, he examines his complicity in his isolation and struggles to define community on his own terms. Through formal invention, high- and low-culture references, and deep wordplay, CLUB Q invites the reader to inhabit the precise imprecision of our human situation. "CLUB Q is an elegant, unsp...
Poetry. MY GERMAN DICTIONARY, which was awarded the 14th annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize by former USA Poet Laureate Charles Wright, is a guide to an idiosyncratic interior country, a map of the experience of absorbing and being absorbed by Central European language, culture, aesthetics, and history. It is a catalogue of small beloved things inflected by massive horrors. The poems are home to and haunted by Franz Marc's horses, ETA Hoffmann's tales, the Great War, Bertolt Brecht, Rosa Luxemburg, enchanted bears, Weimar Berlin, and vanished relatives, along with an entire alphabet of mishearings, mnemonics, and valentines for the German language. These are the poems of an historian wrestlin...
Poetry. A collection that encompasses the Garden of Eden ("Something for Everything") and the end of the world ("Have It, Eat It"), ARTICULATE AS RAIN is an omnium-gatherum of tones, themes, prosodies, and poetic ploys. With characteristic comedy and surprising darkness, Stephen Kampa explores the relational aspects of our lives-love, faith, metaphysics, our civic selves-while revelling in the ranginess of the English language and in the music of its metrics. Yet for all its variety, this book reminds readers that countless raindrops can belong to the same storm. "What first impresses and finally astounds in Stephen Kampa's new collection is the unflagging richness of his invention and virtu...
Poetry. A former winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Morri Creech is one of America's finest poets. His fourth collection, BLUE ROOMS, explores the uncertain terrain between conscious perception and the objective world. This new collection includes powerful lyric sequences that examine Magritte's surreal investigations of the elusive self, Cezanne's attempts to limn the dynamic nature of reality, and Goya's unflinching depictions of cosmic and historical horrors--all while balancing rich language with an exacting formal control. "In these poems, Morri Creech, one of our finest formal poets, confronts the fundamental mystery of language-...
A full-length collection of poems by Mirande Bissell.
Poetry. Winner of the fourteenth annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, awarded by former British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion. Aristotle daydreams in a Chevy Suburban. Darwin is at kindergarten graduation. Six Characters in Search of an Author roam the Wal-Mart parking lot. From a library near Sappho, Washington, to a movie theatre outside Ovid, Michigan, Christopher Cessac's THE YOUNGEST OCEAN explores "everything before versus what is possible." The anxiety of influence at issue here is not just concerned with making art but life in general: "how to be in this world and what role model doesn't disappoint." On one hand, a "peaceful life in an unwalled city" doesn't seem too much to ask. But the...
Danielle Blau's PEEP invites you into a world so strange it is utterly familiar, a world from our ancient past that could also be the future--or a twisted version of the present. It is a mirror world where the husk of our culture shows starkly, and yet it is lit by joy, in the words, the verses themselves. PEEP is uncanny, primal, magical, capturing hopelessness, gridlock, our impact on the environment and those around us, questioning progress and the language we use to speak to each other, each little peep a little life desperate to not pass unnoticed. "The first impressions Danielle Blau's poems give the reader are impressions of newness and immediacy. These impressions also happen to be, ...
Literary Nonfiction. Irving Feldman is one of the USA's finest poets. Approaching his 91st year, he has brought together a collection of aphorisms he has been at work on for several years. "Irving Feldman writes with an immediacy, vigor, and precision of insight that make this book an exhilarating achievement. Again and again, one is brought to consider the claim of unwelcome doubts as well as unsolicited truths. His discipline and economy of phrase can survive comparison with the masters of the aphorism."--David Bromwich "Aphorisms, shrewd observations, rules to live by and rules to resist--such are Irving Feldman's USABLE TRUTHS. Some produce short, sharp shocks of recognition; others need...
Childhood can be a confusing time, but not to Evan and Sage. They've got the world pretty well figured out, and are happy to explain it to their perplexed parents.