Dancing in Odessa

Author	Nick Flynn
ISBN	1555973035

Winner of a "Discovery"/The Nation Award
Winner of the 1999 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry

Some Ether is one of the more remarkable debut collections of poetry to appear in America in recent memory. As Mark Doty has noted, "these poems are more than testimony; in lyrics of ringing...

Author	Jane Hirshfield
ISBN	0060779195

My first sustained meeting with Jane Hirschfield, and I've a feeling we'll sit for coffee again, given her knack for subtle metaphor and fascination with, oh, dogs and mortality and personification. I felt it was stronger BEFORE than After, but maybe it was me. The beginning of the book I read at 4 a.m.,...

Author	Matthea Harvey
ISBN	1882295269

I came to "Pity..." after having read "Sad Little Breathing Machine," so my thoughts on the collection are a bit in reverse. Dean Young's string-of-similes blurb, "this book astonishes me the way I am astonished by jeweled clockworks, siege machinery, the musculature of the shark and hummingbird,"...

Author	Robert Hass
ISBN	0880012420

By the way, speaking of praise: in spite of the fact that Robert Hass merits much of it, for the clarity, the immediacy, the trenchant images, and the thoughfulness of his verse, I still find myself unwilling to grant him my love—as I love Donne, Keats, Mew, O'Hara, and James Wright—because I...

Author

C.D. Wright

In C.D. Wright’s book-length poem Deepstep Come Shining, the eye and the ear are center. In the book, the result of a road trip taken with photographer Deborah Luster through Georgia and the Carolinas, the speaker of the poem is the “hand of the selenographer, mapper of lost roads.” Wright’s...

Author	Brigit Pegeen Kelly
ISBN	1880238136

I read "Song" in graduate school and immediately bought this book, but never made it all the way through. Now I am ashamed of my graduate school self, because this book? INCREDIBLE. It's not always easy to get through Kelly's poems, because they're very dense, but they're also immaculately crafted....

Author	Alex Lemon
ISBN	0977312747

Lyrical and explosive, this debut book of poetry explores Alex Lemon’s experiences as a brain surgery patient. Mosquito blends autobiography and poetry, bearing witness to a young man’s journey through serious illness and his emergence into a world where eroticism, hope, and wisdom allow him...

Author	Carolyn Forché
ISBN	0060925841

Placed in the context of twentieth-century moral disaster--war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb--Forche's ambitions and compelling third collection of poems is a meditation of memory, specifically how memory survives the unimaginable. These poems reflect the effects of such experience:...

Author

D.A. Powell

Came back to this book again after having read some of it before. The intro is great, too; this passage blew me away:

"As memory required me to revisit the deaths of many of these men, I realized that I ran the danger of writing a collection in which death was a consequence of my "lifestyle." (I use...

Author	Larry Levis
ISBN	0822935112

Since the appearance of his first book in 1972, Larry Levis has been one of the most original and most highly praised of contemporary American poets. In Winter Stars, a book of love poems and elegies, Levis engages in a process of relentless self-interrogation about his life, about losses and acceptances. ...

Author	Dorianne Laux
ISBN	0393329623

This is a great collection. I can't get over how well she uses image, how image opens and opens and you become swept up in it, and suddenly see that you've been privy to an entire story that now, in a way, has become part of your own life. There's much sensuality, some humor, tremendous tenderness and joy.

The...

Author	Zachary Schomburg
ISBN	0977770931

Poetry. THE MAN SUIT, a darkly comic debut from poet Zachary Schomburg, assembles a macabre cast of doppelg�ngers, talking animals and dead presidents in poems that explore concepts of identity, truth and fate. The resulting body of work walks a dynamic line--often reading like anecdotal fables...

Author	Dean Young
ISBN	1556593112

Dean Young surmounts the failures of love and the body with his signature humor, verbal banter, and wild imaginative leaps. Embracing the elegiac, angry, and amorous with surrealistic wordplay and off-kilter music, Young coaxes us to "fall higher" into an intimate, vulnerable, expansive exchange....

Author	Aimee Nezhukumatathil
ISBN	0971031088

Poetry. As three worlds collide, a mother's Philippines, a father's India and the poet's contemporary America, the resulting impressions are chronicled in this collection of incisive and penetrating verse. The writer weaves her words carefully into a wise and affecting embroidery that celebrates...

Author	Li-Young Lee
ISBN	0918526531

In this outstanding first book of poems, Lee is unafraid to show emotion, especially when writing about his father or his wife. "But there is wisdom/ in the hour in which a boy/ sits in his room listening," says the first poem, and Lee's silent willingness to step outside himself imbues Rose with a rare...

Author	Olena Kalytiak Davis
ISBN	0299157148

I've acquired a dozen or so poetry books in the last two weeks and the poems contained in And Her Soul Out Of Nothing by Olena Kalytiak Davis are the best. She won the 1997 Brittingham Prize in Poetry for this collection. Here is a sample of her work - The title is "It's Shaped Like A Fork."

This house...

Author	Beth Bachmann
ISBN	0822960400

A beautiful, unflinching book of poems—a tiny novel in verse. Some of my favorite books of poetry—maybe this has to do with the fact that I'm a fiction writer—fall into this category: books that are more than just the sum of their parts, that gather momentum with each poem. The cumulative weight...

Author	Frank Bidart
ISBN	0374522715

I fear too many poets these days are considered "good" merely because they're different, their aesthetic hard, their poetry disarming. Bidart is all of these things, but deserving of our highest praises because his poetry transcends gimmicks to become a new verse, one that is beautiful and painful....

Author	Cate Marvin
ISBN	1932511512

update: I'm thinking this could have been edited into a slimmer and more powerful collection, because I feel like some of the poems were powerful and unique whereas others were just mediocre and not so unique.

Overall, 3 3/4 stars.

***

Macabre in a creepily sing songy manner....