Mark Spitzer lived a life of monstrous passion, continuous inspiration, and constant fascination; but at 57 years, it wasn't long enough. He published nearly forty books: most about fish and the environment, plus novels, memoirs, literary translations, creative writing pedagogy, and, of course, poetry. He was a creative writing professor at Truman State University in Missouri and the University of Central Arkansas where he designed and founded the Arkansas Writers MFA Workshop. He also edited the legendary Toad Suck Review, which evolved into the poetry series Toad Suck Éditions. Having lived in the American North, South, Midwest, and West, and having traveled as much of the world as possible, he spent the coda of his most epic poem (his own damn life) loving family and friends in historic Hyde Park, New York.
...she shows him her birds, birds with bowl-like bodies. he can't believe that she made them with just a Swiss Army knife. and he laughs when she throws him that line from The Winter's Tale-Though I am not naturally honest, I am sometimes so by chance. he buys the birds, saves her life. The Singing Bowl is the story of Rob Morgan-sculptor, liar, Shakespeare lover. She runs away from home as a teen, winds up in Manhattan in nascent Soho and hits the big time only to find that the biggest challenge she faces is to sculpt herself.
Using "eye" instead of "I" is a way to hold the self loosely, to slip out of its insistence and let observations rise without, as Keats says, any irritable grasping. Bove writes with a quiet grace, whether he is speaking of childhood grief over a mother's drinking, or the sudden rapture of stepping out into the swirl of snow.
1000 page poem centered around the daily views from one window. 100 page poem centered around the daily views from one window. 100 page poem centered around the daily views from one window.100 page poem centered around the daily views from one window.
How much dexterity does a writer need to write a "story" in a single sentence? In their virtuosic collection, brevity masters Harold Jaffe and Tom Whalen, drawing from a host of injustices currently at play on our teetering earth, meet this challenge with a variety of formal strategies: prose poems, micro-fictions, creation myths, pensées, headlines, fables, fragments, quotations, and graffiti. With its nuanced, often antiphonal structure, readers of Single-Sentence Stories will be engaged, entertained and informed by this unique collaboration.
Nina Zivancevic's SMRTi belongs to a hybrid genre of fictional poetics cum anthropological essays. These essays are somewhat included in a vast genre of travelogues but these journals are more akin to the explorations of Margaret Mead and Levi-Strauss who believed in the anthropology of the Big Other not the strictly geographical descriptions of the lands we visit.
Christmas 2014: the self is admitted and both self and sister are then discharged after the New Year. We follow the daily life of the psychiatric ward and experience everything from toilet visits, medication, meals, sexual desires to the longing for the outside world.
If "the realm of the personal and sexual has always been literary for men [...] and confessional for women," as Lori Saint-Martin puts it, Marisa Crawford's Diary explodes the literary/confessional binary, pushing the limits of what it means to write a poem, a diary entry, a marketing copy block. A woman works, walks, and writes, traversing Midtown Manhattan on a lunch break from a corporate day job: like her predecessors Frank O'Hara and Clarissa Dalloway, she sweeps through streets and stores, navigating the entangled pleasures and horrors of city life in late capitalism. Family, literary, and personal histories of New York appear around every corner, braiding themselves into poems that glow with longing for this life and for all the others-in memory and fantasy-that shimmer behind it.¿¿
The poet hurts, his "scab is a lake where bull shark flits toward chum." In punchy, clipped poetic prose, he parses out our commonweal psychic pain, each poem a blind alley in which he must retrace his steps to get to the next imagistic manifesto. As always, Seidman is a master of lacerating catalogues, each noun the flick-lash of a whip, regicide the endgame.
Jim, Carole and David engage in teenage clandestine romantic and erotic adventures, plotting and executing revenge against dangerous adults who have done them harm and physically threaten their lives. The novel grips us in a dark delight as they become the people they will become, and, in turn, perhaps have us trace back to the fruition of our own forgotten history. Fireball tells a tale of the immensity of children's lives, those they live out in secret, far from the reach of adult supervision and awareness.
Edward lives in Brooklyn not far from the narrowest part of the Hudson, across from Staten Island. Things happen to him all the time that he can't understand. In the school auditorium singing Silver Bells, Christmas, he faints and travels across the river to another place, not Staten Island, where everything seems drawn and flat-the fluttery, papery world of the unsuccessfully dead. When Edward's mother dies suddenly of a stroke, his seizures become more intense. Mrs. Parenti shows up at their house to explain to Edward's father that he may well have a gift which she could help develop through her séances held in a mysterious townhouse Edward fears but is keenly interested in. Edward's father, bereaving, isn't.
With Rahim for this journey, we ultimately are able to see how she and her loved ones come to acknowledge profound truths about the past and present, as well as the incalculable value, she tells us of this work, her "writing and reading and remembering and reconstructing, where I reside."
"Michael Gregory Stephens teaches us how to look at things we have never seen before-and to make them part of what we know about ourselves." -Paul Auster, author of The New York Trilogy
What London predicted in his 1912 novel has come to pass. Levato has skillfully and sensitively carved current fact and feeling out of another writer's prescient imagination. Scarlet gives me feelings of connection, recognition, and relief in a disturbing and anxious millennium. In a world where nothing makes sense, the book feels like an attempt at sense making. It pieces together what is fragmented, indecipherable, unknown, and frightening. In using the techniques of glitch and erasure, Levato is also playing.
Pritchett's poems manage a level of lyric statement that recalls both Rilke's Duino Elegies and the late poems of Robert Creeley, as the author asks, "May I ruin the poem's / promise with the promise / of another poem / the yet-to-come / forever shining / nickel sweet beyond / horizon's oblivion." Written under the sign of COVID and the attendant global violences related to a pandemic, Sunderland meditates in ardent, necessary, and ethical ways on the "real wonder of the world in its ruin." Both a work of daily apprehension and one sundered from topical realities, Pritchett's work here is invested in poetry's requisite and long-historied demand, asking us "to undergo lyric / as though it were a curse."
Sumitaku Kenshin, a free verse haiku poet, died tragically just before his 26th birthday. He left behind a small yet memorable body of work that consists of 281 haiku. This collection presents the entirety of his haiku in a new translation by noted poet Eric Hoffman.
Richard Martin's recent books from Spuyten Duyvil are Chapter & Verse, Ceremony of the Unknown, Goosebumps of Antimatter, and Techniques in the Neighborhood of Sleep. He is the author of a series of four chapbooks from Igneus Press: Hard Labor, Cosmic Sandbox, Sighting Icarus and Hobo Return. Individual poems from his books have been translated into Vietnamese, Chinese and Russian. Martin is a past recipient of a NEA Fellowship for Poetry, founder of the Big Horror Poetry Series in Binghamton, New York (1983-1996), and a retired Boston Public Schools principal. He lives in Boston with his family.
A "reincarnation adventure" of the highest order, Goold shows the reader "how to distinguish where worlds meet," with a deft musicality and earthly, sensory exactitude recalling Niedecker, Bishop, and Plath. Whether planting bulbs, caregiving, questioning consciousness and systems, or painting rain, this is a new pastoral with able footing both in late modern and postmodern idioms ("you don't need/ metaphor to see the animal that you are"), one that delivers what it promises: to endure, love, and abide.
Gellar-a reluctant scream queen whose oeuvre skews toward horror-and the traumas of her characters echo in the abuse, violence, and shame of the speaker's childhood and adolescence. Queer readers will innately understand this alchemy of fandom and pain, the way in which we come to understand "what is this world but bruises."
The lucid, tender poems in Ça Existe, Lauri Robertson's fifth collection from Spuyten Duyvil, continue to unfold as a series of musings that proceed, literally, from a tower in the Loire valley, the "Garden of France." From her new home, the poet as expatriate psychotherapist-in-retirement addresses the predicament of aging "Boomers" bearing witness to a brutally humanized but undying planet.
These are texts that take us into lived experience and allow us to know an enemy that can never be fully defeated. War, violence, abuse and most recently pandemic have made so many of us tragically familiar with PTSD. Yet Bohm's poems are also strangely hopeful. Their ability to involve the reader and then release him or her lies in the poet's attention to detail, to inner meaning and overall significance.
At once evanescent as life itself and beautifully precise, these are remarkably fluid pieces that have both the advantages of fiction and of prose poetry. They lull you, and then surprise you, moving subtly in unexpected directions.
To call Deborah Wood's Underneath The Occipital Bone poetry is to gravely do it an injustice of its literary brilliance. This is a book that defies the oppressive reality of genre. The writer reminds us why we choose to read in the first place, to love words, relish its sonic resonances and lose ourselves in the wonder of language.
These are the poems we need in this human moment, at the sticky end of the pandemic. Goldman's transcendent vulnerability underscores how little we have, and how precious and resilient it is, after all.
Kate, who has been put away for years in a hospital for the criminally insane, is out now and living by the railroad tracks in a furnished room. Phoebe, ostensibly Nancy's mother, is running scared and putting out contracts with an Albany hit man. The Mayor of this same small upstate New York town is found dead in his office with knitting needles stabbed into his eyes. Lester Mather, community stalwart, is stabbed in the heart. A minor gangster named Nickie is found shot in the head by the river. Nancy's father kills himself. The local psychiatrist is found in his garage with his neck cut through by a pair of shears. At times tender and abysmal, always engaging in energetic jumps from scene to scene, its many characters, their secrets, obsessions, and rich moments of eloquent madness makes Pale Horse a fierce event, perhaps where Dostoyevsky and True Detective meet and wrestle each other in the dark of night.
Tom Cahill thinks the two voices on the harassing phone calls he's been receiving are actually one person. But they are indeed different predators: Eddie Branagan, telling him what he's going to do to his daughter Laura; Phil LaPorta, painting a picture of how great a man Tom, a newspaper columnist, really is. Because the novel cuts back and forth between otherwise total strangers suspense is rendered all the more palpable; and the place, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, shows its many sides in and out of our collective American past. Beetlebomb is a pan through mundane time and place, written in opposition to the otherwise unspoken sources of human shame and brutality.
"In Consummation, Hamilton has nurtured a compelling collection of modern and often queer horror stories. Strands of satire, thriller, and science fiction twist together to form a fear that we would rather tuck away and not talk about. Consummation is a thoughtful gathering of tales that shine a spotlight on the devil in the room, whether that room be our hearts or the society we live within"--
"It may or may not be true that we live each event twice, once as tragedy and once again as farce, but it's certainly true in literature, and in Ann Tracy's stunningly and aptly titled Winter Hunger the Windigo motif, such a force of horror and of spiritual dismay in it's previously studied versions, is used by the author for subversive and often hilarious purposes." Margaret Atwood on Winter Hunger
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