In Pull Yourself Together: The Gena Rowlands Poems (Dancing Girl Press, 2106), Amanda Deutch reminds us of the current and historic importance of the muse. Something draws writers the page, painters to the canvas, and musicians to their instruments. Sometimes it is subtle, sometimes urgent. A self-proclaimed cinefile, Deutch stayed up into the early morning hours watching 70s films and drafting her pieces. She unlocked the smallest details to show how they can be pulled and opened into something much larger. These details draw us, perhaps because of memory or an analogy that only our subconscious could decipher. But once we are entranced, we are forever connected with the piece of art or media that pulled us outside of ourselves. It is always the way the cigarette/ hangs from your lips in each movie that makes you look a little bit tough/ and compels me to keep watching you move. You hold it just so, smoking/ with no hands. You search your pockets and purse for something./ Always searching. Keats saw the delicate etchings on a Grecian Urn, Deutch saw something in the way Gena Rowlands inhabited characters. Maybe they both saw an authenticity in art–the way it can both reveal and produce vulnerability. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Greetings, Pushkin! Stalinist Cultural Politics and the Russian National Bard (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) by Jonathan Brooks Platt explores the national celebrations around the centennial anniversary of Pushkin’s death in 1937. Platt structures his book around the dichotomy of what he sees as two different approaches to temporalities and modernity: monumentalism and eschatology, which celebrate, respectively, the formative moments of cultural narratives as opposed to their ruptures and changes. This theoretical framework engages deeply with the work of such scholars as Mikhail Bakhtin, Susan Buck-Morss, Katerina Clark, and Boris Groys. Through the discussion of the planning and the execution of the jubilee celebration, Platt analyzes the pedagogical practices and the role of teaching of Pushkin at the time; the attitudes of Soviet intellectuals to the phenomenon of the national poet; and the way the life and death of Pushkin were re-imagined in contemporary visual arts, literature, and drama. The concluding chapter of the book traces the transformation of the figure of Pushkin, as well as the memory and legacy of the 1937 jubilee, throughout 20th-century Russian literature. A particularly remarkable aspect of Platt’s book is his decision not to inscribe the Pushkin jubilee celebrations in the historical context of the era of “ezhovshina” and Stalinist purges. Platt argues that the cultural development around the jubilee celebrations demonstrates that the temporal logic that arose in the Stalinist period, is much more complicated than usually believed, and that the jubilee case demonstrates how different perceptions of time and the project of modernity in general could co-exist side by side in Stalin’s time challenging, thus, our established notion and representations of this era. Olga Breininger is a PhD candidate in Slavic and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Her research interests include post-Soviet culture and geopolitics, with a special focus on Islam, nation-building, and energy politics. Olga is the author of the novel There Was No Adderall in the Soviet Union and columnist at Literatura. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Where personal history and shared history intersect, we are left with the figures of memory and myth. These poems seek to reclaim the portions of personal history where we were mere spectators of our lives and the parts of cultural history that define us, even now, without our consent. But what about the figures of myth that once walked the earth? What right do we have to ownership, what bond can be formed through reclamation and fictionalizing of their lives? Westhale claims the right to make art of, from, about our legends–whether they be people or the stories passed down from nation to family and to child. This “cavalcade” marches us to the intersection of “ours” and “theirs,” of “real” and “imagined,” but most importantly, this cavalcade is a procession of history that puts us on the sidelines. From here, we see how our individual waking, breathing, and moving interacts with every history we were born from and into. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

I am not going to lie to you, dear reader, this collection will require you to be fully present. With each layer of the speaker that is revealed, you will shed a layer of yourself. This revealing will bring you knee to knee, eye to eye–two bodies recognizing one another as cosmic dust. What do we allow to confuse this empyrean understanding of one another and of ourselves? we’re what they call a two body problem, it’s like double planets but I was out there at the far end and what you didn’t know but I did: that the stars are far apart that far and with my hearing stretched as far as I could there wasn’t a whisper, not a murmur, not even static that I might’ve called something more or even evidence of something more. Illness compounds time and time is the gatekeeper of our relationships. Noah Stetzer’s poems chronicle the constriction and dilation of understanding. They elevate in lieu of masking. They witness in lieu of reshaping reality into comfort. And these pieces come together to teach us about the fortitude of the human body. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Now in its fifth printing of a very short life, Ashaki Jackson’s Surveillance examines the relationship between acts of violence, the witnessing of violence, the witnessing of the witnessing of violence, and the internalization of all three. Media offers no escape from trauma, instead it creates a cyclical nature where the traumatized are re-traumatized and forced to live out fear after dread after terror. Written over the course of 3 months, Surveillance stretches the far-reaching arms of community to tap into a universal empathy. The collection nearly demands that this empathy exists, almost calls it into being through faith and continued presence. After reading this collection, I thought of the Nikki Giovanni poem Allowables which ends with: I don’t think I’m allowed To kill something Because I am Frightened Our own fear can pull us away from this universal empathy and understanding. The hyper-anxiety mode we are placed in by media rendering of violence, social media proliferation of those renderings, and the vitriol that ensues over our subjective views only positions us in an oppositional stance. Paranoia is heightened and exacerbated until we wonder who among us is human at all? Jackson touches on this very experience: You ask the screen where is the Black body’s god as if it is missing God is there demanding that the Black body get up Like you it is disappointed that the black body too is human Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

  With a genre-bending hybridity that Czerwiec is well-known for, Sweet/Crude: A Bakken Boom Cycle (Gazing Grain Press, 2016) takes the structure of a heroic crown of sonnets and retrofits it for the prose poem and lyric essay. The repetition throughout entrances the reader into the dream state of industrial dystopia that one might find Orwellian but Czerwiec knew as home. The question and answer format is more of a call and response where the speaker ushers you through the duality of truth: what I see is different from what you see, but what lies beneath us is the same. What and who do we level in the wake of our greed? Start reading it for the pleasure of the form, but keep reading it because this is a piece of our history as a nation and society that needs to be held in the tight home of lyric. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

After the enormity of our loss had been calculated, Guzman started writing. Drawn to the page to process his grief and to understand in the best way poets know how, through their art. This chapbook does more than encapsulate the memory of a community, it links that community to a single life and to a larger struggle. /I am afraid of attending places that celebrate our bodies because that’s also where our bodies have been cancelled/ when you’re brown and gay you’re always dying twice/ We are kicking off our chapbook celebration with a call to remembrance to preserve the memory of the 49 people killed and the 53 injured at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, FL. This is also a call to celebrate art in the face of loss, in spite of loss, and the enduring need of the human spirit to express fear as hope. If this wasn’t enough of a reason to click on the link and order the collection, 10% of all proceeds will be donated to Pridelines. The rest of the funds will be used in the continued production of the chapbook, including donating copies to places focusing on queer and trans lives as well as overall support of the production of the chapbook. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

We commonly think of Walt Whitman as the great American poet, the gray-bearded bard who captures the democratic music of our country with, as he called it, his “barbaric yawp.” And, sure enough, Whitman thought of himself this way. “I hear America singing” he famously wrote in the fourth edition of Leaves of Grass. What’s less commonly know is that Whitman had a very clear idea as to how a poet should create this song. In his preface to the very first edition of Leaves of Grass, that book he would add to and enhance throughout his life, he describes his vision of the poetic process: “The sailor and traveler . . . . the anatomist chemist astronomer geologist phrenologist spiritualist mathematician historian and lexicographer are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem.” For Whitman, it’s the craftsmen and scientists who lay down the laws, and the poets must follow them. Now, if your ear got caught in that list on a few odd inclusions–astronomer and geologist make sense, but spiritualist and phrenologist?you’re not alone. In her new book, Intended American Dictionary (Miel Press, 2016), Kate Partridge not only notices, but also explores some of the more unusual and surprising elements of Whitman’s poetry and life, such as the fact that he was fascinated by phrenology, a 19th century pseudoscience that was very popular in his moment. Phrenologists claimed to be able to describe a person’s nature from the bumps on the skull. In fact, that first edition of Leaves of Grass, that book Whitman would rewrite all his life, it was published by two famous phrenologists named Fowler and Wells. It’s this Whitman that Partridge sings and celebrates in her engaging, intimate, and keenly humorous new book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Emily Dickinson is no ordinary poet. Her intelligent and profound work inspires a fierce attachment in those who love it. I know this first-hand. My wife began reading Dickinson soon after we first met and took to the poems so deeply that, a little over a decade later, she published a book about Dickinson’s spiritual life. What that meant for me–in addition to admiring her writing–was that for over a decade Dickinson was more or less a member of our household, readily quoted by my wife on almost any occasion. “If your Nerve, deny you,” she might advise me as I tried to parallel park, “Go above your Nerve.” Or, on a winter morning, she might suddenly reflect on the “polar privacy of a soul admitted to itself.” A number of times I had to remind her that not all of us speak Dickinson. And yet, even if I don’t speak Dickinson, I, too, admire the poet’s work, as well as the spiritual struggles she undertook. So I was delighted to come across Kristen Case’s new book, Abdication: Emily Dickinson’s Failures of Self (Essay Press, 2015), which takes up many of Dickinson’s great themes. What does it mean to be a self? And how can one fail or lose oneself? How does one approach or perhaps even dissolve before God or infinity or finitude? Why do our absences, longings, and emptiness sometimes define us more than what’s actually there, before us, as us? These are dense and weighty questions, and Case takes up with a keen intelligence and deft attention to language, her own and Dickinson’s. Case is, indeed, a writer who speaks Dickinson and a writer worth hearing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

My grandmother, who’s now ninety-eight, lived most of her life in a little town in Southwestern Ohio called Waynesville. The town has reinvented itself in the last few years as a destination for antiquers wiling to pay top-dollar for what she might call junk, but when she was there the town was the small center of a lot of small family farms, including her own. In her years there, she helped run the farm, started a dry-cleaning business, drove the school bus, served as an EMT and worked in the sheriff’s office. She was one of the folks everyone knew. On Sundays, she cooked biscuits for the prisoners in the local penitentiary. For me, growing up, she was just grandma. I didn’t realize the richness of her character until years later, with age and distance, maybe even a little wisdom. In her latest poetry collection, Amy Wright takes this kind of realization and transforms it into powerful, moving, and often times hilarious art. She was raised in the Appalachian region of Southwest Virginia, and her poems, which she calls Cracker Sonnets (BrickRoad Poetry Press, 2016), bring this region and its characters to life. Jax Ovie, Virginia Leabus, Coralee Robins, Leda Burke, Belle Neely, and Edna Culpepper, these are just a few of the folks whose daily grinds and deep affections fill Wright’s poems. And as you can tell from these names alone, Wright portrays her people with what you’d hope from a poet: lyric delight. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry