Books
2011 Poetry Roundup
On November 27, we'll be celebrating our annual poetry issue at the Kleinert/James in Woodstock at 4pm with readings by L.S. Asekoff, Barbara Blatner, Dennis Doherty, Lee Gould, Robert Kelly, Djelloul Marbrook, Molly McGlennen, Anna Moschovakis, George Quashs, Mathhew J. Spireng, Pauline Uchmanowicz, and Barbara Louise Ungar. Hosted by Nina Shengold. Free. Refreshments served.
L.S. Asekoff
Triquarterly Books, Northwestern University Press, 2011, $16.95
“Can you hear me? Now? Now? Now?” Thus begins Asekoff’s brilliant verse novella, a dramatic one-way “phonologue” with Louis, the poet’s mentor-namesake. The witty 60-year-old professor riffs energetically—often savagely—on millennial America. “I began my essay,” he writes, “on the all-American fast food—blood…” Informed by wide reading and a surreal sensibility, this beautifully-crafted comedy of manners moves from rural Maryland to Manhattan’s art world and finally to a hospital where, recovering from a stroke, Louis relearns language, finding consolation in “the visible into the invisible” flights of birds “…like something that has migrated and then found its way home.” A masterpiece! —LG
Barbara Blatner
New York Quarterly Books, 2010, $14.95
Blatner addresses her dying mother in a verse memoir of unflinching physicality: In these vivid imagistic poems, we see the weakening mother become a swamped skiff, “little fish,” “birdbody.” Narrow and jagged, the poems on the page suggest the skeletal mother, the breathless, anguished daughter. But rawness is countered by natural beauty, family bonds, laughter. The shadowy mountains, the lawn’s “mauvey” butterflies, the newly antlered buck offer consolation, while the mother’s lively dialogue charms: “Give me Pavarotti/or nothing!” she crows. Her last words to her squabbling adult offspring? “Don’t be an ass!” Good advice, redemptive poetry. —LG
Dennis Doherty
Codhill Press, 2010, $16
Doherty builds poems like a bower bird, gleaning linguistic trinkets from such unlikely sources as an AP news headline (“Mystery Blob Found Near Dawn of Time”) or the title poem’s discarded carton, with its braggart “Edge Crush Test (40 Pounds).” He sings the body electric in language both startling and muscular, from the ecstatic recollection of “the god-gathered elate bodysurf lift” to the blunt “Mud and sex are wet smut and there’s a lot/you can make with them, like bodies and bowls.” “This is no confessional,” Doherty warns, but his poems court intimate knowledge. —NS
Joshua Harmon
The University of Akron Press, 2010, $14.95
“Spleen” has at least five meanings in French and English, and Vassar professor Harmon explores them all, keeping Charles Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris in mind, while describing the ineffable loneliness of a hard-luck city: “The house shudders in wind/like living with my girlfriend.” Harmon’s poetics is as varied and informed as his observations are piercing, aching, and sometimes chilling. Saying the unimpeachable thing is Harmon’s authority. —DM
Robert Kelly
Station Hill, 2011, $15.95
Composing a book’s worth of poems in unpunctuated two-line stanzas may seem a bit like trying to dance in a straitjacket, but the polymathically perverse Kelly finds freedom in constraint. Call-and-response lines of mysterious beauty (“some say there are no animals at all/men die in India from the tiger claws of dreams”) and quirky humor (“Go milk that cloud of one more morning/language is breakfast but what’s for lunch”) etch themselves on the imagination like cross-country ski tracks. —NS
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