In physics terms, the poetry world is underground “all the way down,” so Influence lurks in each sea cave like a bastard eel, recharging in darkness, awaiting his next dinner with flickering impatience and slaverous hunger. …more

Rane Arroyo’s character shines through in the amazing White as Silver collection, and will be clarified continuously as his vast trove of unpublished work begins to come to light. …more

Kuipers is a “traditional poet” with respect to her unwavering focus on craft; the engine powering her verse is tight word choice that simultaneously conjures up tangible, living objects and powerful emotional resonance.

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The Salt Ecstasies is really just a beautiful book of poetry, filled with blindingly fierce imagery and destructively skillful writing, but it’s most importantly an honest book, its poems written straight from White’s heart and from his gut, teaching the reader a whole lot about the experience of living in this world. …more

I finished reading Just Kids by Patti Smith at Four Barrel on Valencia Street in San Francisco and although I tried my hardest to blink them back, tears kept falling out of the corners of my eyes onto my cheeks and dotting the raw wood table and then I was overwhelmed with sadness enough that I pounded the rest of my coffee in one gulp and actually went outside to walk around for a few minutes to clear the awe and despair from my mind.

Just Kids is Smith’s memoir of her years writing and drawing and singing with the illustrator/sculptor/photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the 1970’s post-Warhol New York City art scene, and it’s unequivocally the saddest and most tender and best-written and most informative book I’ve read on both this period in art history and on the two main characters. …more

“Dear Augusta” by Reginald Dwayne Betts speaks for itself as a whole art piece, horrifying and beautiful and eye-widening, and I’m finding it pretty difficult to write about it at all but it is definitely the last poem I’ve loved so here goes nothing.

The full poem is online in the January 2010 issue of The Collagist, where you can also access an audio file of Betts reading the piece.

Augusta Correctional Center is a prison in Virginia. Betts spent much of his youth in custody after being tried and convicted as an adult for a multiple-felony carjacking at the age of 16. “Dear Augusta” is a kind of letter from Betts, filled with commands, stories, testimony meant for the jail’s walls and rooms, and ending with a question posed to the institution: “Dear Augusta, what do / names mean?” …more

The last book I loved was On the Lower Frequencies by San Francisco’s Erick Lyle, editor of the underground-classic Scam zine, freelance journalist, and musician-at-large. The book reads as a kind of political and cultural memoir, mostly comprising essays and stories previously published in Scam or the TFD, a newsletter covering San Francisco politics.

On the Lower Frequencies spans a wide-ranging grip of topics, including organizing and playing in illegal punk shows in the Mission, marching in the city-shutting-down protest against the war, and a hilarious and terrifying account of the donut shop that was the “epicenter of crime” of San Francisco, which readers might recognize from Lyle’s reading on NPR. …more