All posts by Sean Singer

January 18th, 2012

There Are More Knowzits Than Ever

Coleman’s work is functional and communal; she wields the oral tradition in a way that reflects her poetry ancestry—the blues queen, Koko Taylor, for example, or the fringe Beat genius, Bob Kaufman—but she also shows planed, hewn lines of intellectual poem-making. …more

August 17th, 2011

Wings Wands Stars Tulle

These poems have all the instinct and fangs of a canine, and the plush, electric fur of a wolf: the intensity and sheer quality of workmanship in the poems is impressive. …more

July 15th, 2011

Like Algae on the Surface of Grace

There is a feeling of complicity in his [Dlugos's] best poems in that he makes the reader love the burnished, tumultuous late nights and affection for those around him. …more

July 8th, 2011

Why I Chose Lea Graham’s Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club

Rumpus Poetry Book Club board member Sean Singer on why he chose Lea Graham’s Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You as the July selection for the club. …more

May 4th, 2011

Why I Chose Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club

Tracy Smith’s Life on Mars is a strong, surprising, and often beautiful book. Its themes include family births and deaths, outer space as a metaphor for inner space, and broader political questions regarding violence and power. …more

April 29th, 2011

No Trace of Origin, No Thorn

The poems in Copperhead use the deeply wrought questions with which it is concerned to wisely come up with a sort of memoir, which is attaching deeply felt memories with deeply felt language, thus making it literature. …more

March 15th, 2011

Mis-Writing Race Is a Failure of the Imagination

In February at the AWP Conference in Washington D.C., Claudia Rankine gave a talk about Tony Hoagland’s poem “The Change.”

Afterward, she posted a call for responses to the conversation that started at AWP, and today she posted those responses here. Included among them is a piece by Rumpus reviewer and Poetry Book Club Board member Sean Singer. It is reproduced here in full: …more

December 17th, 2010

From Exuberant Hanging Gardens

Leslie Williams is a fine poet, skillful and smart. She takes a range of topics I find by themselves repelling or uninteresting (suburban life, nature, flowers, gardening, Thomas Jefferson, the American South, etc.) and makes them compelling; she demands my attention because she is such an attentive writer. …more

November 19th, 2010

I Know My Brother In the Mirror

Michael Klein’s then, we were still living is a thoughtful, emotional book that treats death in a fresh, even endearing way. …more

October 13th, 2010

What We Hack Up We Can Choke Down

It is Zweig’s essential Vermont-y-ness that makes her indispensable. The charm and beauty of those green mountains and isolation and mud seasons of that terrain is applied thickly in these poems. …more

September 29th, 2010

When I Go Outdoors, Light Splits

The poems in This Noisy Egg are always engaging and hold the reader’s attention, but they do not feel un-tethered or dangerous. Reading them, I had the sensation that there was little room for what Stanley Kunitz called “wilderness,” the part of the poem that appears to write itself, unhinged from the fantasies and illusions of the Writer. …more

August 13th, 2010

Dead Ahead

Doller’s facility with language, and his wheeling imagination, which pushes language into fresh directions, never ceases to delight the reader. …more

July 23rd, 2010

Better She Had Slapped Me

Tongue contains none of the typical tricks, irony, or obsessive self-absorption of many recent books. Each poem is self-contained, yet are all of a piece. …more

February 24th, 2010

The Ancient Book of Hip

The poems in The Ancient Book of Hip create a precise and evocative description of time and place; they celebrate that space, even as they have a witty undercurrent of critique.

…more

January 28th, 2010

Crimson Colored Raunchiness and Terror

Taste of Cherry is a beautiful, carefully crafted, and sensual display of poetry; the verbal, pyrotechnical, unabashed bravery of the poems is their most significant quality.

…more

August 11th, 2009

Take Dead Aim

fountainAim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize is ambitious and clever. By turns entertaining, fascinating, and charming, it is also monotonous with its adolescent charm and fluorescent insistence. …more

June 23rd, 2009

A Badass Biker Poet: Thom Gunn

gunn-selectedGunn’s work is imminently teachable in the form of Selected Poems, but it is derived from a world that now no longer exists: the Metaphysical poets drawn through the intermingling bodies of the Summer of Love: biker leather, drug haze, and the destructive tragedy of death sought without irony or deconstruction. …more

May 20th, 2009

“Inch of ocean, pinch of face”

savich-coverLike the razor-edged minimalism of Robert Creeley, the rich ontology of these poems, where the content and form eloquently match, communicates carefully into the reader’s memory.
…more

April 27th, 2009

Sean Singer: A Poem I Love

Melvin Dixon’s “Spring Cleaning”

Melvin Dixon died of AIDS in 1992 and is one of our most underrated poets. “Spring Cleaning” alludes to what Ralph Ellison called “the jagged grain,” the texture of experiencing the blues in one’s life. Dixon, an African-American, a homosexual, an intellectual, and a great artist, seems to sum up his own being-it-itself (a mode of existence that simply is) in “Spring Cleaning.” …more

April 27th, 2009

More Than Just a Tussle

skirmishSkirmish kneads the world’s dough through peculiarities that maintain the engagement with strangeness and the fortune of language, both as a path to richness and to predicting what will be. …more

March 19th, 2009

They’re Called Cells for a Reason

wilson-microA review of Micrographia

People don’t read enough, and when they do, they don’t ask the questions of themselves that Micrographia demands. …more

February 27th, 2009

Poems for an Economic Collapse

the-heaven-sent-leaf1Katy Lederer’s poems are both romantic and political in nature. With their attention to formal and lyrical concerns, these poems tackle the problems of desire when it coincides with money and passion. …more

About

Sean Singer’s first book, Discography, won the 2001 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, selected by W.S. Merwin, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is also the recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City.

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