While the personal narrative poems still maintain a steady voice here, they are interwoven with lyric landscapes, fragments of historical documents and redacted government files turned into clever erasures, and meditations on the dangers of scientific hubris.

…more

To Yang, poetry is capable of communicating the consumed during. It is a “library tablet found underground,” whose immediacy is not buried by the passage of time.

…more

For years when I was young I would crouch beneath the dinner table to watch my parents drink after-dinner coffee and wine with an ever-changing group of scientists—a tall man from Colombia whose mustache is even more impressive than my father’s, a shy Chinese man who twice brought me folded paper fans, a thin young woman from India with acetic hair who rarely speaks, but whose murmured jokes can pitch the group into laughter. …more

Emily Kendal Frey’s compact, laconic poems from her first collection, The Grief Performance, outwit, outlast, and, eponymously, outperform not only death, but failure, ennui, and despair.

…more

In this collection, Fisher focuses on the tensions of bringing a child into a world of war— of living your regular, daily experience while knowing that others die by violence, both down the street and across oceans.

…more

Tanning’s poetry is as unique as the artwork she’s produced over the years. It’s real and vibrant, even at the end of her life. This last book of poems is a simple treat – an embrace.

…more

At her best Lehmann exhibits a depth of sympathy and uncertainty paired with keen observation.

…more

Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by Native Americans is a reissue of an anthology first published in 1975. Sacred Clowns won’t jump off the pages, but you will be reminded whose land you may be parked on—if you arrived after Columbus, that is.

…more

In restoring the words of Jesus to their rightful poetry, and making an excellent case for this necessity, Barnstone brings their music, passion, ethics and intellectual rigor into a more complete view.

…more

Her new collection’s… perspectives are varied but unified by intense focus, much like the eyes of bees. Hive is a word that recurs, and the nervous energy of the poems gives the reader a non-alcoholic buzz.

…more

Howell surprises by not trying to surprise at all…. Once a reader takes these poems on their terms, the poems become really intricate and beautiful.

…more

The promised west in The Oregon Trail IS The Oregon Trail is an amalgam of bootstrap romance, wilderness bordered by suburban sprawl, death, and the ferocity of natural processes.

…more

There is a passage in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn where Francie Nolan, the book’s protagonist, is described as the sum of many parts. A genetic and experiential palimpsest, Francie: …more

It’s the project of the impossible, then, that makes Yau’s new collection so provocative and provoking, so worth reading, even for a reader’s or poet’s temperament that might be different from Yau’s.

…more

Truman Capote famously said that what Jack Kerouac did wasn’t writing, but typing. I take just as much offense today to this slander as I did ten years ago as an undergraduate when first hearing it quoted by an English professor. …more

Kinsella describes; he does not prescribe. He rests less comfortably in his retreat than Thoreau and without the surety that he lives an exemplary life.

…more

On the Media’s annual publishing industry episode covers a lot of ground with segments on this year’s Pulitzer fiction snub, e-books and changing reader behavior, fears of an Amazonian monopoly, copyright concerns, and more.

I found this text to be profound, relentless, frustrating, inspiring, demanding, silly, pompous, elastic, and mind-expanding. That is what poetry is for, and this is for poetry.

…more

Jon DeRosa is best known for leading the drone-pop collective Aarktica. Late last year DeRosa kicked off a new solo pop project with the release of the Anchored EP. …more

Inspired by last year’s video by Melissa Jackson, librarian at Ballou Senior High School in Washington DC, Guys Lit Wire held two book fairs that helped Ballou move from having a library with “less than one book for each of its 1,200 students at the beginning of 2011 to a ratio now of two books per student.”

Hoping to further decrease the school’s “literary deficit,” GLW is kicking off another book fair. Check out how to go about purchasing books off their wish list.

Ahmed’s roots construct a more nuanced Americana, as we follow Ahmed through the industrial American cities where she calls herself citizen (read: “free”), to her always-estranged returns to Dhaka.

…more

I had read the book months ago. And then, standing in front of Edward Hopper’s “The House by the Railroad” at the Museum of Modern Art, I found myself trying to explain to a tango-friend from South Africa why this painting—one she wanted to walk past without more than a cursory glance—was important. I wished Edward Hirsch’s book,  The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems, had still been in my bag. His poem “Edward Hopper and the House by the Railroad” gets so much right about the painting, and so much right about the artist as well: …more

I was ten years old when 1999 became 2000. My knowledge of the Y2K problem was vague; I could only glean a nebulous mood of panic from overheard newscasts and conversations between adults. My own parents did not seem worried. We went to New Year’s Eve festivities at a family friend’s house. I was part of a kid coalition that choked down the mature prosciutto-melon appetizers, then huddled in the basement away from parents and their flowing Korbel. We watched five or six hours of a South Park marathon. At midnight one of the adults humorously turned the lights off to invoke–what? Apocalypse? The failing of computers all over the globe? Everyone thought the prank was very funny. That was my Y2K. …more

There is dissonance here between expectation and want, a dichotomy as digestible as life and death, or heaven and earth

…more

From these two new books, the reader can gather that it isn’t just the day that is strong and can withstand change, but the same words can be applied to the speakers of these poems and to Myles herself. …more

Based on the true story of an English midland town in the year 1666 that quarantined itself to sweat out the bubonic plague, Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague reminds me of the private school campus where I live with my family in the suburbs of Baltimore, the year 2012. We are a small community, and when people get sick other people know it. Our reaction to illness, then, as now, is what is fascinating to me.  …more

It’s easy to write off one author based on a best-seller. Call it jealousy, call it high-end literary disdain, call it whatever you want, but it’s easy to give in to the impulse to distrust something once it’s become popular. This indeed was my reaction to the author Elizabeth Gilbert, who I (as many others) first encountered by way of her memoir-cum-chick-lit classic Eat, Pray, Love. I read her because I felt I had to have hard facts to back up my loathing, and I found facts in spades: her self-indulgent pity, her defensive arguments about the validity of eating pasta and practicing yoga and falling head over heels in love after too much heartache. I wrote her off, and so did many other readers, as fluffy and inconsequential, someone who’d rather gaze at her navel than investigate and report. …more

The Atlantic examines the above graph and stats, concluding that the Internet hasn’t in fact “killed reading books” and suggesting that we have a skewed “collective memory of past.”

(Via The Daily Beast)

But even here, vertigo and ambivalence dominate, and I find myself searching the poems for the kinetic energy of a walker in the city; heel marks and muddy droplets. I want to overhear conversations on the streets.

…more

With its host of defunct genomes, a rupturing cosmos, malevolent gods, a derelict body politic, and endless war, the poems in this collection act as harbingers of the wasteland America may soon become.

…more