New Books In Poetry

Belmont (Graywolf Press, 2013) is a book of poems written by both a grownup and a child and each seem quite aware of the other. This split-consciousness, if you will, hangs around most of the poems, but not in a tense or obvious way, but from afar, after one has put the book down. Belmont is written by a confident adult, with the disassociated charm of a child playing alone: the one doesn’t need to be validated by us, while the other doesn’t know we’re even in the room. This is the book’s strange disposition: a warm and loving indifference. When young poets are eager to impress, they often just bully the reader with novel forms and precious philosophy. This sort of aesthetic nervousness doesn’t exist in Belmont. Instead, Stephen Burt‘s virtue of clarity is reflected back to us in a number of ways: the humbling attention to craft, the amicable but rambunctious diction, and being unapologetic about subject-matter that is both public and private. How many poets have the guts t

The poems in Katy Didden‘s debut The Glacier’s Wake (Pleiades Press, 2013) are civilized and dignified and so are their surfaces: sophisticated soundscapes, pitch-perfect diction, a humane voice. And in The Glacier’s Wake, we do, in fact, encounter poems that exhibit a high-level of competency as it relates to craft. And it’s certainly true that someone who devotes time and energy and improves their skills is indeed involved in a virtuous endeavor. Dedication to poetic craft, however, is not only a bulwark against vice, but almost always a sign that a poet is using craft to veil a great suffering, and I sense Katy Didden’s poems are doing exactly that. Didden’s technical abilities have less to do with a deference to tradition, but have to do with a more urgent obligation – protecting both the reader and the poet from her grave interior life, which is one of the most generous gestures a poet can make. We flourish in her poems because the poet protects us from her. But

James Longenbach‘s The Virtues of Poetry (Graywolf Press, 2013) is not interested in the vices or failures found in some poems, so his concerns are not necessarily moral ones, but instead, as the title of the book suggests, he is interested in understanding what makes a particular poem (and poet for that matter) flourish, and therefore what makes a reader flourish. And it is this relationship – the one between reader and poem – that James Longenbach’s book honors through his ingenuity of reading poetry through the framework of virtues, such as boldness, compression, dilation, excess, restraint, and shyness to name just a few he identifies, and he unearths these virtues by focusing on a poem’s prosody and diction and syntax and even the poet’s life – apprehended through letters – as well. The Virtues of Poetry is a joyous book of criticism, written by a poet and critic who does not seek to reprimand poems – which is usually the result of someone mired in ta

Joshua Edwards‘ new book and its title, Imperial Nostalgias (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013), hint at a yearning for a lost world all of us helped to destroy or at the very least forgot. While tipping his hat to the social sciences throughout the book, Imperial Nostalgias is cunningly personal: each page is an intimate window to look out of, a window to take siesta in, a window to shout from, to lean beyond, but never a window to leap from because the poems don’t harass the reader into annihilation. Instead, they are oddly charming and innocent, perhaps a counter-force to what his eye must behold. Most of his poems are like games of tag between imagery and aphorism, between abstraction and the concrete, and this is the direct result of a person devoted to travel, which Imperial Nostalgias seems a direct result of. In fact, when I finished the book, I felt like I hadn’t talked to another person in weeks, as if sitting on a cross-country train ride as the subjects of his poems flashed by: the hist

As I waded into Erica Wright‘s first books of poems, I immediately became not only aware of my gender, but the event that is female, woman, girl, and child. In fact, gender – that construction site where culture and biology come together to play out their destructive and creative collaboration – seems at first to be the blueprint for the lyrical arguments made in each poem, but it turns out gender might only be a part of the poems’ machinery. Wright’s speaker, while someone who rejects the wide bubbly grin and feminine pose of the little girl, and indeed someone who prefers dirt under her nails instead of polish painted over them, wants us to understand that the violence of loneliness, regret, and vulnerability have perhaps less to do with gender or sex, but more to do with the fundamental element that makes us all human: the need to be loved and the need to love. Instructions for Killing the Jackal (Black Lawrence Press, 2011) is filled with both poems of confrontation and poems

Kevin Goodan‘s latest book of poems, Upper Level Disturbances (Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University, 2012), directly challenges modern society in at least one respect: the poems exist as a result of humility, the opposite of boasting which our culture rewards. In the poems, we’re introduced to a speaker whose daily experiences – which involve working dangerously or dangerously at rest – seems nearly shorn of his fellow human beings, and in fact it often feels that his poems might be the only communication he has with anyone beyond the forest and fires and rivers and beasts that populate his verse. Ultimately, however, Kevin Goodan is a poet who is generously private: his voice is totally singular in expression (no one sounds like him), but also belongs to us. We might not entirely relate to his physical labor, his actual work that is represented in these poems, but his spiritual labor and work is undoubtedly our own. But perhaps what is most powerful about these

In Sudden Dog, the voice we encounter is a moody one to say the least. We find a poet who at times seems to believe the entire human project is stupid – and I mean all of it. While at other times we meet a speaker so desperate for an authentic experience that he claws violently inside and straight through the visible world to uncover just one thing that can’t be reduced to a physical event – something invisible in each of us that is too bittersweet to stop looking for. But most surprising, after the poet’s cantankerous and difficult spirit stops to rest, we see and hear a speaker of such surprising and provocative tenderness that it made me realize these poems are not complaints of victimization, but doubtful prayers of a man who refuses to surrender his dignity to a sick world. In the interview, the poet and I discuss a variety of topics: his growth as a poet, how his first book Sudden Dog was published, the way his poems behave across the page, and much much more. I hope you enjoy ou

To read Samuel Amadon‘s latest book of poems, The Hartford Book (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012), is to know for the rest of your life what it feels like to be punched in the nose. In these poems, we are introduced to a band of misfits who turn deviant behavior into a sublime activity. The poems, written in a street-wise vernacular, are honest to the point of humiliation and despair. Full of rhetorical and formal mania, the poems produce in the reader feelings of anxiety and heightened awareness, and joined with the shocking content, the final effect is devastating. The Hartford Book is a journey to the underworld where the slum and street-corners are enchanted, and there’s only one outlaw – the poet – that seems remotely aware of an alternative path, a path that leads straight out of Hartford. In the interview, the poet and I discuss a variety of topics: the poet in the academy, the process of writing The Hartford Book, the formal aspects of his poetry, and much much m

First things first: this is a book of amazing, beautiful poetry, and you should read it. In translating Xi Chuan’s Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems (New Directions, 2012), Lucas Klein has given readers access to a bilingual journey through more than two decades of the Xi Chuan’s evolution as a writer, a person, and a historian. The poems collected and rendered in Notes on the Mosquito range from evocative lyric verse about shepherds and loneliness to historical essays that consider the “New Qing History.” (It is a striking range, and one that was quite unexpected for this reader and historian.) In our conversation, Lucas was generous enough to explain many aspects of his process and approach as a translator, and to read a number of the translated poems collected in the volume. We talked about several aspects of his work, including both practical issues and more conceptual questions about the linking of history and poetry in the writing of a poet and a reader’s approach to th

What makes something a poem? What defines “poetry,” and how has that changed over space and time? Critics and Commentators: The ‘Book of Poems’ as Classic and Literature (Harvard University Press, 2012) considers such questions as they chart a path through literary studies in Chinese history. From the comparative poetics of a Han dynasty “critic in the borderlands” to the theories of May Fourth intellectuals, Bruce Rusk’s elegantly written and carefully argued new book traces the changing relationships between secular and canonical poetry over 25 centuries of verse in China. Rusk introduces readers to a cast of fascinating characters in the course of this journey, from a versifying “drive-by” poet to a gifted craftsman of textual forgeries. In the course of an analysis of the changing modes of inscribing relationships between classical studies and other fields in China, we learn about poems on stone and metal, literary time-travel, ploughing emperors, and

Curtis L. Crisler is a prolific poet, novelist, and mix-genre author who writes about the American experience. In his work, Crisler turns a particularly keen eye toward the Midwest, masculinity, and jazz. It seems he has published a book a year since 2007, gaining the attention of critics and winning several major awards. Currently, he teaches creative writing in the English Department at Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW). He has three books: Pulling Scabs (Willow Books; Aquarius Press, nominated for a Pushcart), Tough Boy Sonatas (Wordsong; Boyds Mills Press) and Dreamist (YA mixed- genre novel from Willow Books; Aquarius Press). His chapbook Spill won (the 2008 Keyhole Chapbook Award at Keyhole Press). He edited the nonfiction book, Leaving Me Behind: Writing a New Me (Lulu.com), on the Summer Bridge experience. He is the recipient of Cave Canem grants (a Cave Canem Fellow), also the recipient of the Eric Hoffer Award, the Sterling Plumpp First Voices Poetry Award, an IAC grant, Soul Mo

Cosima Bruno‘s new book asks us to consider a deceptively simple question: what is the relationship between a poem and its translation? In the course of Between the Lines: Yang Lian’s Poetry through Translation (Brill, 2012), Bruno helps us imagine what an answer to that question might look like while guiding us through the sounds and spaces of contemporary Chinese poet Yang Lian. Between the Lines proposes an innovative way to read a poem through and with its translations, using a “triangular comparative analysis” that juxtaposes the original poem with a number of its translations to identify shifts in the lines of the poem that serve as landmarks in the conceptual and textual world of the poet. Bruno uses this translation-focused methodology of reading to reveal fascinating dimensions of time, space, and subjectivity in Yang Lian’s work, and to guide our attention to the performative importance of rhythm, blank space, punctuation, and sound in his verse. Readers who are interes

When it comes to writers and artists, biography plays a provocative role–yielding insight into both artistic influences and origins. This is especially true with the modernists, in particular T.S. Eliot. After graduating from Harvard University in 1910, the young Eliot spent a year in Paris, a year that had a lasting and profound effect upon his work that has gone largely unexamined until now. In her riveting intellectual biography, T.S. Eliot’s Parisian Year, Nancy Duvall Hargrove, the William L. Giles Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Mississippi State University, revisits that single year in the poet’s life to mine it for later influences. While this period is often interpreted to be typical of the early 20th century post-graduate foreign study experience, Hargrove invites us view it as extra-ordinary. Linking Eliot’s work to the Ballets Russes, the music of Stravinsky and the intellectual tension ofLaNouvelle Revue Francaise, she demonstrates the rare coming together of

There is no better description of poet Makalani Bandele‘s debut book Hellfightin’ (Willow Books, 2012) than the one found on his comprehensive website: “Derived from the nickname the French Army gave the all-Black 369th Infantry Regiment in World War I, the Hellfighters . . . is a tour de force of lyricism, mysticism, jive philosophy, and discursive narrative as blues lick. The title of the book, Hellfightin‘, as a term is best understood in the context of the critical framework of the Blues …” Bandele’s Hellfightin‘, then, is a poetic education in the African American musical, cultural and historical traditions, and one of the latest installments from the famous creative ensemble known as the Affrilachian Poets. Bandele couldn’t be among better company than those poets who seek to bring attention to the black literary tradition within the Appalachian territories. Hellfightin‘ does all that and more. Listen to how Bandele tells us how.Learn more abo

[Re-posted with permission from Jenny Attiyeh’s ThoughtCast] When Helen Vendler was only 13, the future poetry critic and Harvard professor memorized several of Emily Dickinson’s more famous poems. They’ve stayed with her over the years, and today, she talks with us about one poem in particular that’s haunted her all this time.  It’s called “I cannot live with You.” According to Vendler, whose authoritative Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries (Harvard University Press, 2011) has recently been published, it’s a heartbreaking poem of an unresolvable dilemma, and ensuing despair. This interview is the first in a new ThoughtCast series which examines a specific piece of writing — be it a poem, play, novel, short story, work of non-fiction or scrap of papyrus — that’s had a significant influence on the interviewee, that’s shaped and moved them.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

UPDATE: Nikky Finney’s Head Off and Split has been named a finalist for a National Book Award. Congratulations, Nikky, from the folks at New Books in African American Studies and the New Books Network!) Poet Nikky Finney’s new book Head Off & Split (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2011) has made an immediate splash, receiving well-deserved critical acclaim from the literary world and wide attention from the reading public. Although her book has only been out a few months, it has already been widely reviewed, with Finney featured on the cover of the prestigious literary journal Poets and Writers. Finney is among the who’s who of writers, a poet about whom Nikki Giovanni says, “We all, especially now, need.” And yet Finney is unpretentious, caring, and inspirational. All this is illustrated in her interview for New Books in African American Studies, where she discusses the autobiographical impulse behind the book’s title, pays homage to black womanho