New Books In Poetry

I won’t say Ailish Hopper‘s collection Dark~Sky Society (New Issues Press, 2014) is “about” anything because that would do it a disservice. These poems are human. They move like legs on a street, like a mind at work that calls you to ruminate with it. Because we can’t understand everything, we have to be comfortable in that space of being unsure. Hopper calls it “Art out of Ignorance” and I agree, but wonder if it is not also “Art out of a Refusal to Misunderstand.” It is not easy to stay in an uncomfortable space until you hit on a truth. It is also difficult to accept silence as a part of communication but this poet does and what she has discovered, she shares with us in this collection. “Dark Sky Society” does not see its own bravery. It does not draw attention to its confrontation of everything “place” can mean. And it does not apologize. The poems implicate themselves, and in turn implicate anyone who has ever dared to wonder,

About twenty years ago, I heard William Stafford read his poetry for about twenty minutes. For a young aspiring writer like I was then, he was mesmerizing, a mix of poetic energy and grandfatherly wisdom, with a high-spirited charm. I think it was the first poetry reading that I attended in which I realized that poetry didn’t have to be solemn and ponderous to be profound.  All of us in the audience laughed a lot. And we were moved. It was only after the reading, after I’d said how enjoyable I found Stafford, that some bitter professor-type said something like, “You know, that’s just his shtick. He’s a much darker poet.” I was troubled, and the remark sent me into Stafford’s work to see if it was true. I was happy to discover the same joy in Stafford’s poetry as I’d experienced in hearing him read, but there was more to it. His was a complex vision, and, to this day, I can recall lines of his that I read over two decades ago. I’m not alone in this ex

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Aimee Nezhukumatathil & Ross Gay Lace & Pyrite Organic Weapon Arts Press, 2014 Two gardens, 500 miles apart, managed to be in conversation with one another over the span of five seasons. What came of their conversation was this collection of epistolary poems by two brilliant poets. Part exchange, part mediation on hands in dirt and the deep well of winter, this collection offers sustenance to the mind as the garden does to the body. We do not need technology to connect us; our innate connections already exist– we just have to recognize them, nurture them, and watch them grow.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Rachel Moritz Many Forms in Water above/ground press, 2014 Born of a connection to Theodor Schwenk’s 1965 text Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms in Water and Air, this collection seeks to inhabit that infinitesimal space left between water and that which holds it. Not everything that conforms to its container is formless– sometimes, like Moritz’s verse, a liquid will become a gas and a gas will become all things, inhabit every scant surface of the earth we’ve been given. Moritz can make words pour, flow, and puddle.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Nikki Wallschlaeger I Would Be the Happiest Bird Horseless Press, 2014 It is transient, it is migratory, it embarks from the restlessness of youth and family and lands in self-actualization. I’ve never/ thought of myself as much of a threat, sitting here in a room w/ cats & a space heater trying to figure out/ how birds flying in the sky still has relevant meaning, how not caring if it does means more than// a thesis or carefully splattered book (the trick is believing in yourself long enough so that the words/ come out more or less honest, pitting vulnerability against craft.) I Would Be the Happiest Bird interrogates our “where?” and calls to piece of us that still looks up and wonders, “if I could fly, how far would my wings take me from here and would I ever come back?”Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Daniel Borzutzky Bedtime Stories for the End of the World Bloof Books, 2014 This is a collection in which the synaptic leaps have their own synaptic leaps. In direct confrontation with neoliberalism, Borzutzky holds nothing back. His verse levels the page like a chainsaw, leaving the surreal, bloodied and bare. “At times like this he thinks: I can say just about anything right now. This is, after all, a bedtime story for the end of the world. I am moving beneath ground and not sleeping and trying to cross the border from one sick part of the world to another” Prepare to be altered by these poems.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Amber Atiya the fierce bums of doo wop Argos Books, 2014 Densely-packed prosody and firecracker content fill the pages of this stunning, debut collection. It is a native NYC voice, it is a fearless voice, and it commands your attention. Atiya weaves flawless verse; buy this chapbook and bear witness. You’ll want to wear her poems like a vintage leather jacket.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Ashley Inguanta For the Woman Alone Ampersand Books, 2014 More artistic creation than poetry collection, more journal than sketchbook: For the Woman Alone resists category to transport the reader into the mind of an artist. In her own handwriting, Inguanta invites the reader into a world of fragmented beauty, memory, and vision through the clearest lens.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Ken Pobo When the Light Turns Green Spruce Alley Press, 2014 A garden is not always a garden: our metaphors speak of our experiences and musings. Pobo shows the reader how seasons can mean change of weather, passage of time, and realizations of mortality.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Laura Foley Joy Street Headmistress Press, 2014 Within Joy Street are access panels to the poet’s mind. She has a stunning way of bringing a reader to a place and time and then making them feel comfortable only to pull their attention and turn their head towards the heart of the matter. The poems in this collection are worlds– worlds orbiting memory and understandingLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet The Greenhouse Bull City Press, 2014 In a collection that subverts sentiment even as it delves into the rich inner life of human sentimentality, Stonestreet stretches language and the reader’s expectations across the page. White space is a mind at work, parenthesis are interrogations, and prosody is the song of new life. This chapbook is must-read for anyone marching toward an unknown era of being.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Leslie McGrath By the Windpipe ELJ Publications, 2014 A poetry of the mind, a poetry of form, a poetry of sound? McGrath’s verse resists a container– it springs up organically from human impulse and psyche. By the Windpipe is a collection, years in the making and guided by a brilliant and deliberate hand.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Yu Han Chao One Woman Fruit Stand Imaginary Friend Press, 2014 Stunning and startling imagery carry this collection of fruit, bearing, and creation through to the final line, “…and life will never be the same again.” This is a journey of place, of memory, and the human capacity to find meaning in every crack and fissure of life.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Dan Brady Cabin Fever/Fossil Record Flying Guillotine Press, 2014 Modeled after Eugene Leroy’s layered paintings, these poems assemble and dissemble themselves right before the reader’s eyes. This is an exciting form that complicates the content of what we say and what lies just below the surface of our intent and meaning.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Megan Moriarty From the Dictionary of Living Things Finishing Line Press, 2014 Part dictionary, part guide to living, and part historical record of content, From the Dictionary of Living Things turns its own pages. It is a beautifully crafted and thought-provoking first collection from a poet at the beginnings of her career.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chapbookapalooza, 2014 Lyric Hunter Swallower Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014 Mastering a bi-lingual prosody, these poems confront the idea of “city” and our romanticizing of containers. They show a brilliant mind disassembling trite societal structures.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At Chapbookapalooza, our headliner goes first. And here she is with a stunning collection of poetry that subverts pop culture by placing it in direct conversation with everything it hints at but is too shifty to engage outright. With Elegant and cerebral verse, Leah Umansky shows us in Don Dreams and I Dream (Kattywompus Press, 2014) that nothing is surface-level when minds are involved. Her unforgettable speaker engages with the fictitious Don Draper and everything he stands for in our consume/consumer/consumed reality. This book will make you happy. Don’t you want to be happy?Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book of poems, Origins (Palimpsest Press, 2012), the Canadian writer Darryl Whetter uses metaphor to excavate the links between pre-historic life, extinction, evolution and modern-day sex. In this interview with the New Books Network, Whetter says the fossilized remains of ancient creatures are like poems that use metaphors to convey emotion and truth. “Fossils share a lot of analogues with poetry,” Whetter says. “For one, we get that incredible power of compression.” He explains that from fossilized fragments, scientists extrapolate whole creatures and ecosystems. “And that’s so much like poetry, where to just take the most common tool of poetry, metaphor, we’re getting a lot of ideas compressed into a few words.” Origins, published in 2012, begins with the fossil cliffs at Joggins, Nova Scotia, a UNESCO World Heritage Site where coal-age forests flourished 310 million years ago. The book also takes Whetter in search of the dinosaurs at Drumheller, A

Dorothea Lasky‘s Rome (Liveright, 2014) is a collection that will catch you off guard. Lasky lures the reader in with familiar language and imagery only to have them suddenly realize they’ve been brought to room where the walls wobble and collapse, eternally revealing darker passageways. She is undoubtedly a language poet but also one who sees language as a roadblock. The communication is in the sound. Just as with Hemingway, words are merely an entry point to meaning. Stripped of even punctuation, these lines hurl themselves at the reader. Do not take this economy of language as simplicity. Within it are the layers of desire, grief, betrayal, and rage. Lasky’s speakers embody everything that is human yet alien, familiar and foreign. Emboldened by their own savage humanity, they assert themselves into landscapes and consciousness. But this is not easily won– Lasky lets us into her process, revision, and search for obsession. If she cannot lose herself in the poem then she will not offe

Bangalore (Copper Canyon Press 2013) by Kerry James Evans calls out to its reader from an urgency that is its own place and time. He has inhabited many spaces, geographically and socially. His poems reach out from them. Evans shows us that poetry, as the great communicator, can hold the violence of this life and render it in such a way that it startles our desensitized consciousness once again. This is not for shock value, this is his way of picking up a portion of our world and bearing it to you, palms up. Do with this what you will, but it is truth. Evans dares to address the realities of class in the United States by implicating himself in the narrative. He brings the reader to layers of this country many will never experience. Effigy of myself. Effigy of anything but Alabama and Alabama all the same, boiled peanuts rotting green on a gas station counter outside Montgomery, reminding me of you, and how you cling to life: one tendril coiling a pair of pothole diggers. He imposes no structure on his poems, b