Reviews
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A Struggle at the Roots of the Mind
I don’t know if I’m the only youngish reader to have this chip on my shoulder, but I always sort of assume that poems by older people get mellower. Let me say it again: Rich’s lines are harrowing, are incensed…
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Let’s Float Free in the New Air
Such a surreal experience of the human body pervades See Me Improving. There is as much mystery in sneezing as there is in orgasm.
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Chronicle of a Death Foretold
A hedge-fund manager predicts the 2008 financial meltdown, but adds little to our understanding—or our sympathy.
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Lounge Music
This is a book meant to bring poetry to the masses, in other words, and so [Editor A. J.] Rathbun has thrown in something for every taste, if only to ensure that every reader will find something to love.
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Look! Look! Feathers
Mike Young’s debut collection sifts through the lives of characters on the fringe, grounding moments of the surreal in a world that is frighteningly real.
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Shape of a Key, of a Dog, of a Letter
Cassian’s strongest poems–and there are many of them in Continuum–function in this way, where the initially familiar becomes a catalyst for something pleasurably disorienting as she subverts the expectations that she initially led us to have.
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A Clouded Thing
Jaimy Gordon’s National Book Award-winning novel conveys the hard-knock world of horseracing in a style reminiscent of Walker Percy and Mark Twain.
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Hammer Is the Prayer of the Poor and the Dying
For [Christian] Wiman, form is the fire his feet are held to. It’s the syntactic embers that burn, the linguistic flames that flare. At no point does Wiman let the reader forget he is reading poetry.
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You Know Nothing of My Work!
Douglas Coupland’s new biography of Marshall McLuhan bends the rules of the medium—but what, exactly, is the message?
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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…
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Animal Farm
The residents of the Rancho Armadillo commune share everything, but soon discover that people, like chickens and pigs, are “not rational beings.”
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Monkey Bars
The result of Lippman’s perpetual contentiousness is a collection that is confrontational in the best sense of the word, interrogating the reader, himself, and America pretty much as a whole about child-rearing, over-medication, racism, consumerism and whatever else you’ve got.