Zirconia

Author	Cathy Park Hong
ISBN	0393064840

Cathy Park Hong is a true artist of language. Here she has constructed a pidgin out of numerous major world languages, and wielded it masterfully in the voices of her characters to speak about revolution, corruption and the landscape of the future. Definitely read these poems aloud to fully enjoy the...

Author	Harryette Mullen
ISBN	0520231430

Harryette Mullen's fifth poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary, is the abecedarian offspring of her collaboration with two of the poet's most seductive writing partners, Roget's Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary. In her ménage à trois with these faithful companions,...

Author	Ariana Reines
ISBN	0977106470

1. Reines is brave and honest because she's willing to admit that being socialized as female is, effectively, being trained to be a corpse.

2. This book starts out politely invitational and theoretical, but something terribly scatological happened about 20 pages in where the lingua bacteria...

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	Brenda Shaughnessy
ISBN	0374526982

The Next Illogical Step In Love Poetry

"The next illogical step
in love poetry
The most inscrutable beautiful names in this world
always do sound like diseases.
It is because they are engorged.
G., I am a fool.
What we feel in the solar plexus wrecks us.
Halfway...

Author	Matthea Harvey
ISBN	1555974805

Matthea Harvey's Modern Life introduces a new voice that tries to exist in the gray area between good and evil, love and hate. In the central sequences, "The Future of Terror" and "The Terror of the Future," Harvey imagines citizens and soldiers at the end of their wits at the impending end of the world....

Author	Mary Ruefle
ISBN	0887484670

from Indeed I Was Pleased with the World by Mary Ruefle:

Grief


First, it will comfort you to know there are crows.
And calipers for measuring the amount of sunshine
that can escape from under the shadows
of thought. Far out at sea ships go down
in a crippled light,...

Author	Alice Notley
ISBN	0140588965

Alice Notley vividly reconstructs the mysteries, longings, and emotions of her past in this brilliant new collection of poems that charts her growth from young girl to young woman to accomplished artist. In this volume, memories of her childhood in the California desert spring to life through evocative...

Author	Sarah Manguso
ISBN	1882295331

Holy fuck.

This is one of those books of poetry I keep next to my elbow while writing prose, so I can read it and be inspired when my own prose starts not to sound beautiful enough.

It's also one of those books of poetry that makes you desperate to be best friends with the author, and SURE that...

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	Aase Berg
ISBN	0977770974

In this, her first single-volume collection to be published in English, Aase Berg works a wicked necromancy in her poems. Filling each page with fluids and viscera she plunges into the palpable, pulsating center of our psyche--pulling up fistfuls of nightmares at once strange and familiar. To read...

Author	Ashley Capps
ISBN	1931968373

In her first book, Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields, Ashley Capps sounds like the voice of a fresh generation of poets, where the familiar turns suddenly elliptical, straight talk goes engagingly crooked, and the lyric negotiates with the matter-of-fact. Desperate for something solid to believe...

Author	Heather Christle
ISBN	0980193834

The Difficult Farm is where you’ll find surprising jolts of the sweetest kindness delivered via poetry that’s new, urgent, blessed, beautiful, careful, tenacious, a little scary, very scary, and awfully generous to us all. When I read a poem by Heather Christle I’m awed. – Dara Wier

This...

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....

Author	D.A. Powell
ISBN	1555973957

kids everywhere are called to supper: it's late
it's dark and you're all played out. you want to go home

no rule is left to this game. playmates scatter like
breaking glass
they return to smear the ______. and you're it
--from "[you'd want to go to the reunion: see]"

In...

Author	Dorothea Lasky
ISBN	1933517247

If the book of Revelations had been scribbled in the diary of a precocious fourteen-year-old girl, the prophecies might look something like Awe. Dorothea Lasky is a daring truth-teller, naming names and boldly pushing the boundaries of confession. The secrets she tells are truths we recognize in...

Author	Sabrina Orah Mark
ISBN	0975499017

Funny and frightening, moving and unsettling, the prose poems in Mark’s debut collection take readers on a wild ride

The Babies, by Sabrina Orah Mark, is the premier winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Contest, judged by renowned poet Jane Miller (Memory at These Speeds: New and Selected...

Author	Amy Gerstler
ISBN	0142000647

Sly and sophisticated, direct, playful, and profound, Amy Gerstler’s new collection highlights her distinctive poetic style. In thirty-seven poems, using a variety of dramatic voices and visual techniques, she finds meaning in unexpected places, from a tour of a doll hospital to an ad for a CD...

Author	Ben Lerner
ISBN	1556592116

The Lichtenberg Figures, winner of the Hayden Carruth Award, is an unconventional sonnet sequence that interrogates the relationship between language and memory, violence and form. “Lichtenberg figures” are fern-like electrical patterns that can appear on (and quickly fade from) the bodies...