Books For The Politically Alienated
The founding editor of Bookslut offers an eclectic selection of books that might help us confront our own deeply American sense of political alienation. One of them I especially want…
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Two Books from Helen Vendler
Long time Rumpus Reviewer Barbara Berman examines the two latest offerings from critic Helen Vendler, one on Emily Dickinson and the other on the last books from five of the…
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…
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.
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…
My Year In Books
As The Millions keeps rolling out their amazing Year In Reading series, I’d thought I’d offer my own attempt at doing justice to the books in my life, and not…
The Visual World Of W.G. Sebald
“Sebald is brilliantly visual. He makes you realize with some discomfort that you often fail to look attentively enough at what you see. Another novelist referred to the “phenomenal configuration”…
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…
Falling in Love with AHWOSG 10 Years Later
I hate it when people buy me books for the holidays. I’m a firm believer that certain books enter into our lives at exactly the right moments, and if a…
John Knight: The Last Book I Loved, The Best of Roald Dahl
There are too many good writers for me to keep track of so, mostly for the sake of convenience, I categorize them: Koontz writes thrillers, Franzen does literature, King fills…
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.
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…