New Books In Poetry

She Has A Name (Four Way Books 2014) by Kamilah Aisha Moon is a startling collection that dares to intimately address the way a family transforms when caring for an Autistic child. Deemed a “biomythography,” (a term coined by Audre Lorde), the works are cautious in their rendering and respectful in their assertions. The reader is taken into the minds of each family member as they navigate the joys and difficulties of shifting their own perception to meet that of a loved one who experiences the world through an entirely different lens. Although we are not offered insight into the mind of the youngest sister, I dare say she is the poetry, she lives in the verse that we the readers must decipher and make our own. In this debut collection, Moon also offers a singular view of the speaker in later pieces. Although there is a disconnect with the voices of the family, the speaker carries them with her as she wades through the world Mysteries of mass wrong turns, sick leaders and sirens forever sexy land o

In my dream, I am the president. When I awake, I am a beggar of the world. The landay represents an oral tradition of a mostly illiterate people. It is a dirge, a calling out to, that is specific to each woman who sings it. Even within the confines of an unwavering regime, life finds a way. We, as Americans, will recognize ourselves in these landays. We will see our drones and occupying soldiers enter the consciousness and historic tradition of an ancient people. May God destroy your tank and your drone, you who’ve destroyed my village, my home. Eliza Griswold traveled to Afghanistan extensively as a reporter and then again to collect the landays she had encountered. Throughout their hesitancy, the Pashtun women left Eliza with the representation of a millennia of culture to decipher. With the help of translators, she took the folk couplets from literal translation to poetic pieces featured alongside their history. I am a Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan (Farrar, Straus, and Gi

Language Arts (Wave Books 2014) by Cedar Sigo is a departure and then reintroduction to form on avant garde’s terms. In addition to disparate explosions of imagery, Cedar trains the ear for surprise of sound and a prosody that was born of childhood prayer, exposure to native tongue, and an understanding of musical composition. You enter a foreign landscape and exit much wiser.     Kiss the lights and they change out over the Stardust Cities are huge machines for sorting poets Starting down the cellophane-enfolded hills Even cast off lines have their own pull and rhyme. (Excerpt from “After Self-Help”) His love of poetry extends far beyond his own written word. I was impressed by the wealth of knowledge he drew upon in our talk, let alone in the creation of his verse. There is a reverence that any listener would find endearing and ensures us that our art is in the hands of a master. And I tell you, the sonnet never looked so good. Just like his poems, our conversation was full of su

Kevin Prufer is a rare poet who manages to layer narratives and weave metrical variations seamlessly into his work, all while placing it on the page in an organic and “effortless” way. This is especially notable when we come to understand the process by which his poems are born; the disparate connections and glorious jumps, as though into blackness, that he makes in each piece. Churches (Four Way Books, 2014) is a collection that dazzles with sound and macabre landscapes where anything is possible. The title of a poem that we did not feature (and listeners must seek out) is “The Idea of the Thing and Not the Thing Itself” is, in my opinion, an excellent representation of the entire collection. It is as though ideas manifest into characters and anecdotes just to explain themselves better, then turn back into the intangible and unreachable, leaving only a hint of themselves in the verse. Prufer is a poet that you can trust with your mind. He may bring you to the reaches of subjective rea

To read Venus Thrash‘s The Fateful Apple (Urban Poets and Lyricists, 2014) is to venture into two assertions of self-hood.  The first is a raucous, boundary-setting with the world and the second is reverent consciousness of ancestry and quietude.  Thrash plays out her own duality of self and history and takes the reader on a journey back to the center, the place we return to when no more is expected of us. The connective tissue for these different worlds is music– it is used to place the reader in the nostalgic landscapes of the speaker’s memory.  Beyond the quoting of and allusions to song, there is a musicality of loss and longing that permeates the verse, “…why not call it a painful, joyful kind of knowing, one that stretches the knowing, loving embrace of the blues beyond where the blues thought it could go?” (Dr. Keith Leonard, Foreword pg. 4). From the bustle and life of urban streets to the bucolic and pastoral, Thrash is present in the landscape and the page. “

In Jason Koo‘s new collection, America’s Favorite Poem (C&R Press, 2014), we see a poet placing himself on the timeline of his art. This timeline covers an ethnic, geographic, and artistic lineage that pays homage to Brooklyn’s literary heritage. As founder of Brooklyn Poets,  he extends his literary citizenship to offer community to disparate groups of poets who live and work in the borough. With Whitmanesque, sprawling lines, Koo finds the minutia of introspective content and sound to populate his pieces. What initially appears conversational, contains multitudes. He faces the darkness with an innate humor that assures the reader, nothing is so awful that it can’t be laughed at. This extends to the poet’s lighthearted demeanor and ease with the world. Koo has reverence for his literary forebears and this is expressed in his title choices and placement of the self against the metropolis background, wondering, “Whether I’ll screw this up, whether I’ll ever f

In The Earth Avails (Graywolf Press), Mark Wunderlich presents a world unfamiliar to most of us: rural life. While many poets are enamored by the impact of the Internet and the smartphone upon the self and how the digital landscape has changed our understanding of the worlds around us, Wunderlich’s book seems to be arguing that the best way to know who we are is not by excavating the immediate world around us, but the world we’re losing and have nearly lost. In poem after poem, he investigates the relationship between humans and animals, humans and the environment, and through that inquiry we discover that our divorce from nature has not only had devastating consequences on the planet, but on our imaginative and moral lives. And while this would depress most to consider, Wunderlich proves ultimately resilient and hopeful and not just for himself, but for his reader. During our discussion, we cover a lot: his childhood, homosexuality and popular culture, his time in New York City, the relationship

Kenneth Goldsmith‘s latest book Seven American Deaths and Disasters (powerHouse Books, 2013), a title taken from the series of Warhol paintings by the same name, is a classic book of defamiliarization. By transcribing the words broadcast in real-time by the media’s unscripted response to historical events, Goldsmith brilliantly drains these infamous moments of cliche. Choosing seven critical moments in American history, which all have in common the spectacle of violence and lose, Goldsmith creates a traumatic prose that yields a poetic response to the John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and John Lennon assassinations, the space shuttle Challenger disaster, the Columbine shootings, 9/11, and the death of Michael Jackson. Because we experience public events most often through the media, those events quickly take on the voltage of performance, and Goldsmith takes advantage of this by being the casting director and choosing who will have the speaking roles. In “Seven American Deaths and Disaster

David Biespiel‘s Charming Gardeners (University of Washington Press, 2013) is unlike any book I’ve read in a long time. Filled with epistolary poems, his book – despite being populated by the poet’s friends and family – is actually a work of great loneliness. In many ways, Biespiel’s journey is America’s, where the road is both a symbol of arrivals, but also departures, and in between is solitude. On the surface, Biespiel’s poems seem like the private meditations of one man. However, his poems encompass each of us, socially and politically, by illuminating our nation’s contradictory character: a longing for enchantment in a disenchanted world. The poems in Charming Gardeners live between the wilderness and the civilized and the poet, finding himself in this zone of uncertainty, does what any of us would do: call out to those we love. In our conversation we discuss his years in Boston and D.C., the Attic Institute in Portland, the poetry wars, and so much m

Like great critics, the poetry of great editors is often overlooked, but I don’t see how this can be the case with Don Share, whose work is too good to be ignored. A brilliant combination of the public and private, meshed together by a dark intuitive music, his poems brawl in ways that will startle most readers. But isn’t that what we want from poetry: a language true enough to make us vulnerable. The poems in Wishbone are both brooding and sensitive and at times even funny, but perhaps most importantly, Share’s poems are humane. During our chat we talk about his formative years in Boston, his editorial partnership with Christian Wiman at Poetry Magazine, a poet’s identity, and so much more. I hope you enjoy our talk as much as I did.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Late Parade (Liveright, 2013) has received a lot of attention and it’s well-deserved. Adam Fitzgerald‘s poetry is a berserk love song and between his high-rhetoric and experimental disposition, the reader is treated to a performance that pushes delight into zones of trauma. The poems in The Late Parade nearly outbrave us with their will, except each stanza and line, though dense with wattage, is also heavy with vulnerability and yields – almost as an act of compassion – a strange and emptying alchemy we associate with a poetry that exonerates us from ourselves. During our chat we discuss the malls of New Jersey, his formation as a poet (and reader), his friendship with John Ashbery, and so much more. I hope you enjoy our chat as much as I did.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Marvelous Things Overheard (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), Ange Mlinko‘s poems exhibit a sonically rich landscape articulated by a beautiful voice that is so measured and covert that history itself is seduced into singing to us who are decaying in the present. Mostly centered in the Mediterranean, Mlinko’s poems guide us into the prefectures of time to recover and reinvent the enchantment of our beginnings and by doing so enlarges our imagination as we move into the future. While her themes are global, her eye is local, and the combination yields a sort of prudence most of us have forgotten we need in order to live more truly and more fiercely. During out chat, we talk about her childhood in Philadelphia, her years in Morocco and Beirut, the Mediterranean’s impact on her poetry, and so much more. I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I did.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the age of five, poet Stephanie Strickland and her sister received a book from their grandmother that included a poem by John Farrar called “Serious Omission.” I know that there are dragons St. George’s, Jason’s, too, And many modern dragons With scales of green and blue;   But though I’ve been there many times And carefully looked through, I cannot find a dragon In the cages at the zoo! The poem stayed with Strickland.  “What is the serious omission?” she asks.  “To not be able to find that dragon?  To fail to discriminate the hugely many implicate orders of life?” These questions, not to mention dragons themselves, drive Strickland’s new book of poems, Dragon Logic (Ahsahta Press, 2013).  Her fiercely intelligent and morally acute work captures e-dragons and sea dragons, as well as a beast she calls the “Hidden Dragon of Unstable Ruin.”  The poems even offer “Dragon Maps,” that take “catastrophic forms and safe

Mary Ruefle‘s newest book of poems Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013) is brilliant. Her poems have the confidence of a poet who is utterly fearless, but wise enough to never come out and brag about it. Her poetry is honest, but dignified, thoughtful and bizarre, and with a fidelity to lived experience that is heartbreaking. During our chat we talk about childhood, the life and mind of the artist, her neighborhood in Vermont, and so much more. I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I did.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is a struggle sometimes in biography to find new ways to write about subjects about whom many biographies have been written. This is particularly pronounced in the case of iconic figures of the 20th century (think: Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Onassis, Elvis Presley, F. Scott Fitzgerald), and an area in which the partial life biography can play an interesting role. Whereas biographers have more traditionally opted for what we call “cradle-to-grave” narratives, the partial life biography instead offers a slice of a life- a particular period that is explored in-depth. Such is the case with Elizabeth Winder‘s Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953(Harper, 2013). Plath’s is a story most everyone knows, and yet her time working in New York as an intern in Mademoiselle has not previously been studied outside of the context of all that came after, which is surprising because it’s an interesting period but also because her experiences then formed the basis for what s

William Logan is often thought of as a critic first and a poet second, so his verse doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves. In Logan’s poetry we don’t find the spooky discursiveness or the back-breaking effort to avoid lyrical expression we often encounter in contemporary poetry. Instead, what we find is a poet who writes poetry simply because he must. He’s inspired to write and doesn’t write to be inspired. His poetry is meticulously crafted and sensitive to the seen and the unseen world we inhabit. The poems in Madame X (Penguin Books, 2002) are the result of what happens when you put tremendous pressure on yourself and language at the same time: beauty, death, and love emerge with terrifying clarity. In our conversation, the poet and I discuss his time living between Florida and England, his undergraduate years at Yale where he worked closely with poet Richard Howard and television writer David Milch, teaching poetry workshops at the University of Florida, old girlfriend

In Paul Killebrew‘s latest book of poems, Ethical Consciousness (Canarium Books, 2013), the speaker inhabits the everyday structures of our lives, but responds to those structures in an entirely uncommon way. For Killebrew, his severe poetic lines (which he explains the origins of), once latched together create poems that act like tire-irons that the poet uses to pry open anything he chooses to attach his attention to. Once object or idea is uncovered, his depth of vision achieves its beauty by allowing the poems to travel freely within those newly revealed districts where they must. In short, he guides more than he directs, which is always a gift to the reader. In our conversation we talk about his childhood in The South, his parallel loves for the law and the poetic, how his books came to be published, and so much more. I should mention that we conclude the interview with a reading of his epic poem “Muted Flags”. I hope you enjoy our chat as much as I did.Learn more about your ad choices.

Michael Robbins, author of Alien vs. Predator (Penguin Books, 2012), has gotten a lot of attention for his book of poems because of his relentless mashing together of pop-cultural references with literary and scholarly ones. Also, his ubiquitous use of rhyming was strangely considered noteworthy by poetry readers. Why has a mode of expression that is found everywhere in popular culture and art history so provocative to the poetry community and the general reader? Because most readers focused on the hypnotically vulgar surfaces of his work, without bothering to discover why the poet was writing the poems that way. While Alien vs. Predator is certainly a sharp critique of the plasticity of a fallen world, that isn’t the only thing that drives him to be a bit trashy and sinister. That impulse happens to spring from Mr. Robbins’ gentle and awkward heart. We explore the spirit of his work in our discussion, along with other topics like cats, Heidegger, pessimism, book reviewing, his next poetry manuscr

Dana Gioia‘s deference to poetic tradition and artistic beauty is intolerable to those who taste the venom of ideology in every linguistic expression of experience. But what ideology is present in the poet’s response to having lost a child? More broadly, what ideology is at play when our bodies find pleasure in the music of words, what ideology is at play when form is not used to preserve some aristocratic sensibility, but to protect the self – poor or rich – from its own nature, and what ideology is present in a poetry that celebrates the act of reading by seeking common ground with the reader? Ideology is not at the root of Dana Gioia’s Pity the Beautiful (Graywolf Press, 2012). Instead, one discovers an uncanny humility, sadly so foreign to us in our Age of Boasting, an age that exists because we let others convince us we lack so much. But it isn’t that we lack so much, but that deep down we sense that this world is not quite our home; that there is another home hidden f

In Little Stranger (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), Lisa Olstein‘s poems are concerned with the tension between the public and the personal and how the former bullies its way into the latter. Olstein’s book is both provoked into existence and inspired by our contemporary moment. Its urgency makes sense when one sees Little Stranger as a book that is responding to the twilight of privacy, in which delivery systems of information are networks networking with other networks. Information ricochets into individual lives in a stream of binary extremes: on the one hand we have unprecedented access to knowledge, while on the other hand we sense the great proximity between ourselves and the authentic. At times, one can feel trapped into making one of two extreme decisions: to retreat into social fantasy or devote one’s life to resisting a world that seeks to know our every move as if to empower us, when actually it often does the opposite. But the poems in Little Stranger reflect a more realistic picture