New Books in 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

Readers gather around: Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity (Sundress Publications, 2016) is an anthology for a new era. As Cathy Park Hong states at the end of her New Republic essay, “There’s a New Movement in American Poetry and it is Not Kenneth Goldsmith”: “poetry is becoming progressively fluid, merging protest and performance into its practice. The era of Conceptual Poetry’s ahistorical nihilism is over and we have entered a new era, the poetry of social engagement.” This anthology stands with a significant few who are helping to usher in or marking this renewed time of social engagement through poetry. Up and coming poets are balking at the instruction to stay away from the political, the politicized, and the instigative. We are writing about the body as we have come to understand it, not a version sanitized for comfortable consumption. With two editors–Fox Frazier-Foley and Erin Elizabeth Smith–at the helm who were fully present in their responsibility to broadly represent the politics of identity, this anthology is unafraid. It refuses to apologize and instead insists that it is owed some genuflection. Unified in their disparate realities, these 65 poets sing, perform, and present their versions of life, love, and loss across spectrums and time lines. Listen here for four of these exceptional poets to share their work. This anthology, these poets, and these editors understand that literature has a responsibility to reinforce or establish empathy; it is not merely a mirror or means of self-appraisal, it has a responsibility to act as connective tissue. Pick up a copy of this anthology today. Share it, give it as a gift, teach it–let these poems flex and stretch throughout the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

“Poems of Nomadic Dispersal” This latter phrase in the title of Janice A. Lowe‘s new book–LEAVING CLE: Poems of Nomadic Dispersal (Miami University Press, 2016)– has hung around me, following me through my home, around the rural town where I live and have not yet become fully accustomed. The insistence on “landing somewhere” has resonated with me. The notion of understanding that place enough to call it home has altered the way I see myself geographically. The poems themselves have hung around me, in their narrative, in their varied terrain of verse topography. And then I heard the poet read her work, and the lines that had been trailing me rose up to eye and ear level. I understood the many levels on which these poems are operating. my House was small her secrets full of wildflower memory of Hungarian table wines her backyard of mint and rose breath singing through humble cracks a milk chute for bottles no longer delivered her garage a sentry box weary from Black sightings the inevitable advance of Color How fitting that this poet is also a musician, that the open-ended movement through states she sought to capture, is also expressed in the small rooms of a musical movement. These movements, like poems, work separately, but need to be played in succession for the performance to be complete and for totality of expression. At the end of the interview, we feature one of these tracks. Of this process, Janice writes, “When Leaving CLE started to grow, to become an entity of text, the words of the book started to sing and drum. In getting out of the way of the music coming through, I’ve set four poems from Leaving CLE. Resistance Girl T is one of those insistent tunes. Am I composing a song cycle or musical? Parameters don’t matter. There will be more of whatever this flow is.” Track Credits: Resistance Girl T (6:02am) Written, Composed and Produced by Janice A. Lowe Keyboards and flute-Janice A. Lowe Bass-Yohann Potico Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

What is explosion? What does language look like when it mimics a gas leak, a bang, or rubble? What does language look like when it orbits other sounds, mediums, and musicality? How can it then react to and converse with itself? Rodrigo Toscano is a poet who trusts his creative impulse, trusts the place in time, space, and his mind where art is born allows this wave to carry the poet where it will. It is this ceding of will that permits a collection like Explosion Rocks Springfield (Fence Books, 2016) to fully realize itself. How can we better understand how a mid-day, multi-structure gas explosion took no lives? But this is isn’t about the explosion that took no lives. This has everything to do with the explosion that took no lives. And everything to do with dialogue, and the cosmos, and ancient civilizations. Interconnectedness is expressed at its most fundamental level. How can we better understand the philosophical impact of each word, each turn of phrase, each image it conjures, and how this language is language? The text casts you out to the furthest reaches of what could possibly be derived, and then reels you back in to “The Friday Evening Gas Explosion in Springfield Leveled a Strip Club Next To a Day Care.” This refrain, this text is artifice. After it has pulled you back into itself, it intersects: The Liberty Box checked to spec as did the Libidinal Lines at the Thought Crossers. Strange thing was the Gonad Gauge didn’t register the Need Switches. Good Thing the Big O Override tripped the Care Breakers right then. I’m sure that’s what kicked the Ego Ventilator, eventually firing up a Poetic Alarm. The Locked Out/Tagged Out American that’s the working title. Toscano treats the line as sheet music, elevated beyond communication to artifice. Musicality, philosophy, composition. He pulls from everything in his reach: musical composition, philosophy, ancient history, and anthropology. This book needs to be experienced as an entity. Allow it to register on all levels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Paul Rouzer‘s new book offers a Buddhist reading of a famous collection of poems and the author associated with them, both of which were called Hanshan, or Cold Mountain. On Cold Mountain: A Buddhist Reading of the Hanshan Poems (University of Washington Press, 2015) presents and proposes what it calls a “Buddhist approach to poetry”: rather than focusing on the intentions of the author in reading poetry, it offers a way of thinking about the importance of the way a poem is read. Pt. 1 of the book introduces readers to the history of, and some of the technical issues surrounding, the Hanshan poems: its prefatory material, later debates about its authenticity, arguments in Chinese scholarship about the life and dates of the poet. It also proposes a way that we might think about a “Buddhist poetics.” Pt. 2 of the book looks closely at the overarching themes and rhetoric of the poems themselves, looking at the ways that meaning is made through internal and external juxtapositions, and tracing the tensions between moving and staying, residence and travel, and motifs of “blasted trees,” moons, jewels, beautiful women, and more through the poems. The same year that Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums appeared – 1958 – American poet Gary Snyder published his first translations of Hanshan, and Pt. 3 of Rouzer’s book considers resonances between the Beat and post-Beat writers and the Buddhist rhetoric, imagery, and themes of the Cold Mountain poems. It’s a fascinating book that’s a pleasure to read for both specialist and general readers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

From its opening fragment on “Fragments” to its “Possibly dolorous tropical lyrical coda,” Simon Critchley‘s new book is a pleasure to hold in the hand and the mind. ABC of Impossibility (Univocal Publishing, 2015) is a collection of fragments and a catalog of “impossible objects”: poetry, America, emptiness, indirection, money, and more. Thoughts and jokes and quotes and small essays ranging from one line to several pages are arranged in a sequence that plays with unusual juxtapositions and acts as a form of “counterpoint,” riffing on and playing off of the work of Pessoa and Augustine and Rousseau and Blake and Heidegger and others. This is a thoughtful and playful book about time, and the sea, and humor, and loss, and slavery, and the importance of unlearning. Highly recommended! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Tina Escaja‘s, Free Fall/Caida libre, translated by Mark Eisner (Fomite Press, 2015), is an exceptional example of poetry in translation as artistic collaboration. Poetry exists outside of the margins, and this often creates an insurmountable task for those seeking to relay emotion, realization, and epiphany across language barriers. The nuances and inflections of colloquialism and historical, cultural understandings can be lost. We, as readers of translation often wonder, what is kept of the music and what is kept of the intent? Translations can only bring us to the precipice–language allows us to take the plunge. We must trust our translators to be lovers of verse. Escaja works in an experimental form that is most likened to the cycle inherent in life, death, and rebirth. Even throughout the lines and stanzas, there is a stopping and starting again, a dropping off and returning. Recuperarnos quiero. Aprender a nacerme de otra en ti. Sin vuelta posible. Sin colchon salvavidas, sin suturas. Caidalibre. I want to recover us. To learn to be born of another in you. Impossible to turn back. No life vests, no sutures. Free fall. Beyond translating language, Eisner has taken on the task of translating experience. This is unabashedly a feminist text and a challenge that Eisner understood better as an opportunity. The least likely combination of writer/translator is a woman writer and a male translator (http://womenintranslation.tumblr.com/). These two have also collected, translated, edited, and complied (with the help of other talented folks) an anthology of Latin American Poetry of Resistance, furthering this work of artistic collaboration while focusing on social justice. Find out more information about these writers and projects at www.RedPoppy.net To the poet about to be translated, Escaja offers, “You must be open, patient, and generous.” To the translator about to embark on their first project, Eisner offers, “Think of it as an art and embrace it as a creative challenge.” Listen here for Tina’s readings of her pieces in their native tongue, and Mark’s reading of his translations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry