books
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This collection will destroy you. It is such a finely wrought, spot-on exploration of grief–grief over the death of children, two of them, which is always unimaginable, if you’ve ever loved a child. In a steady sequence of brief, lyric poems, Catherine Barnett reifies this grief through objects, dreams, tableaus. The tableau is actually such
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This book has stayed with me since I read it. Ben Lerner’s extended prose and verse sequences are strange, interesting. They dazzle with wit and then clobber with heavy truth. Some of the prose pieces are smart microessays on culture, and the book as a whole takes a critical stance to our post 9/11 American
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I think Mark Doty’s collection was one of the first books I read by a gay poet as a gay literary work. As in, I didn’t read it and find out later he was gay, and I felt like the poems were constructed in and because of a gay identity. It came into my life
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This is one of my favorite books to come back to and read again and again because I feel like I always find new things in it, and the pleasure of the poems’ sounds never decreases. It always feels new, interesting, unique. But what I really love about Harryette Mullen’s collection is that while there
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I read this book when I thought the Midwest had no poets. I grew up in a place where writing poetry–because it involved no stock cars, no beer cans (or so they thought!), and no women in bikinis–was considered a feminine pursuit. For a long time I thought poets only lived in coffins, and a
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What happens when you take “Paradise Lost” and cross out all the boring parts? Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os (Get it? Paradise Lost.) I had never read a book like this when I had read it, and it encouraged me to experiment with erasures. I know many other poets have done this and done this well,
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