New Books in Poetry

She Has A Name (Four Way Books 2014) by Kamilah Aisha Moon is a startling collection that dares to intimately address the way a family transforms when caring for an Autistic child. Deemed a “biomythography,” (a term coined by Audre Lorde), the works are cautious in their rendering and respectful in their assertions. The reader is taken into the minds of each family member as they navigate the joys and difficulties of shifting their own perception to meet that of a loved one who experiences the world through an entirely different lens. Although we are not offered insight into the mind of the youngest sister, I dare say she is the poetry, she lives in the verse that we the readers must decipher and make our own. In this debut collection, Moon also offers a singular view of the speaker in later pieces. Although there is a disconnect with the voices of the family, the speaker carries them with her as she wades through the world Mysteries of mass wrong turns, sick leaders and sirens forever sexy land or sea. The unequaled rush and horror of forgetting ourselves. I believe this collection will be a companion to many souls sorting out their past and present realities, reconciling themselves with the worlds they’ve been given, and seeking to translate the many layers of existence into one, readable language. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In my dream, I am the president. When I awake, I am a beggar of the world. The landay represents an oral tradition of a mostly illiterate people. It is a dirge, a calling out to, that is specific to each woman who sings it. Even within the confines of an unwavering regime, life finds a way. We, as Americans, will recognize ourselves in these landays. We will see our drones and occupying soldiers enter the consciousness and historic tradition of an ancient people. May God destroy your tank and your drone, you who’ve destroyed my village, my home. Eliza Griswold traveled to Afghanistan extensively as a reporter and then again to collect the landays she had encountered. Throughout their hesitancy, the Pashtun women left Eliza with the representation of a millennia of culture to decipher. With the help of translators, she took the folk couplets from literal translation to poetic pieces featured alongside their history. I am a Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014) combines her translations with Seamus Murphy’s photography for a book that bridges artistic and reference. It is a necessary collection that allows us, but a brief moment in the lives and generations past of Pashtun women. When sisters sit together, they always praise their brothers. When brothers sit together, they sell their sisters to others. Although this is a much shorter format than our regular podcast, we want to get word of this collection to you in any way we can. It represents not only a historic oral tradition in poetry but a people that hold tightly to their culture in the face of constant change and war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Language Arts (Wave Books 2014) by Cedar Sigo is a departure and then reintroduction to form on avant garde’s terms. In addition to disparate explosions of imagery, Cedar trains the ear for surprise of sound and a prosody that was born of childhood prayer, exposure to native tongue, and an understanding of musical composition. You enter a foreign landscape and exit much wiser.     Kiss the lights and they change out over the Stardust Cities are huge machines for sorting poets Starting down the cellophane-enfolded hills Even cast off lines have their own pull and rhyme. (Excerpt from “After Self-Help”) His love of poetry extends far beyond his own written word. I was impressed by the wealth of knowledge he drew upon in our talk, let alone in the creation of his verse. There is a reverence that any listener would find endearing and ensures us that our art is in the hands of a master. And I tell you, the sonnet never looked so good. Just like his poems, our conversation was full of surprises and revelation. From identity poetics to poets in translation, Cedar was candid and engaging. He invites readers into his inner world via the page and keeps them there with twists and unexpected turns. He is effortless. I invite you to listen to our exchange, hear his work, and purchase Language Arts so that you may return to it time and time again, discovering something new with each read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Kevin Prufer is a rare poet who manages to layer narratives and weave metrical variations seamlessly into his work, all while placing it on the page in an organic and “effortless” way. This is especially notable when we come to understand the process by which his poems are born; the disparate connections and glorious jumps, as though into blackness, that he makes in each piece. Churches (Four Way Books, 2014) is a collection that dazzles with sound and macabre landscapes where anything is possible. The title of a poem that we did not feature (and listeners must seek out) is “The Idea of the Thing and Not the Thing Itself” is, in my opinion, an excellent representation of the entire collection. It is as though ideas manifest into characters and anecdotes just to explain themselves better, then turn back into the intangible and unreachable, leaving only a hint of themselves in the verse. Prufer is a poet that you can trust with your mind. He may bring you to the reaches of subjective reality but you always return somehow more whole and with a greater understanding of the human conditions of suffering, grief, love, and fear. He is modern poet whose lines you can scan for meter and device! Just as the Romantics, he brings the abstract of Negative Capability to life on the page. It is for these reasons and many more that I suggest lovers of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and all semblances of the written word, pick up Kevin Prufer’s newest collection, Churches and let him take you where he will. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

To read Venus Thrash‘s The Fateful Apple (Urban Poets and Lyricists, 2014) is to venture into two assertions of self-hood.  The first is a raucous, boundary-setting with the world and the second is reverent consciousness of ancestry and quietude.  Thrash plays out her own duality of self and history and takes the reader on a journey back to the center, the place we return to when no more is expected of us. The connective tissue for these different worlds is music– it is used to place the reader in the nostalgic landscapes of the speaker’s memory.  Beyond the quoting of and allusions to song, there is a musicality of loss and longing that permeates the verse, “…why not call it a painful, joyful kind of knowing, one that stretches the knowing, loving embrace of the blues beyond where the blues thought it could go?” (Dr. Keith Leonard, Foreword pg. 4). From the bustle and life of urban streets to the bucolic and pastoral, Thrash is present in the landscape and the page. “Nighttime furls its dark brow /swallows the town in blackness.// Beyond the bend in the road/ a weather-beaten angel oak// twists into an arthritic pose.” I deeply enjoyed speaking with Venus about her debut collection, her childhood in Georgia, and her life in Washington D.C.  There is a calmness present in her that radiates, even through voice, to others and draws them nearer.  The same can be said for her writing.  It takes the reader to unfamiliar terrain, but with an assured hand guiding them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In Jason Koo‘s new collection, America’s Favorite Poem (C&R Press, 2014), we see a poet placing himself on the timeline of his art. This timeline covers an ethnic, geographic, and artistic lineage that pays homage to Brooklyn’s literary heritage. As founder of Brooklyn Poets,  he extends his literary citizenship to offer community to disparate groups of poets who live and work in the borough. With Whitmanesque, sprawling lines, Koo finds the minutia of introspective content and sound to populate his pieces. What initially appears conversational, contains multitudes. He faces the darkness with an innate humor that assures the reader, nothing is so awful that it can’t be laughed at. This extends to the poet’s lighthearted demeanor and ease with the world. Koo has reverence for his literary forebears and this is expressed in his title choices and placement of the self against the metropolis background, wondering, “Whether I’ll screw this up, whether I’ll ever feel like I have enough,// Whether I am enough.” I encourage listeners to pick up America’s Favorite Poem for the countless pieces that could have been featured on this podcast if given the time. From baseball to artistic gentrification, we discussed it all on a rainy Saturday in NYC. I hope you enjoy this, my inaugural podcast with a brilliant writer at the beginning of a surely monumental career. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In The Earth Avails (Graywolf Press), Mark Wunderlich presents a world unfamiliar to most of us: rural life. While many poets are enamored by the impact of the Internet and the smartphone upon the self and how the digital landscape has changed our understanding of the worlds around us, Wunderlich’s book seems to be arguing that the best way to know who we are is not by excavating the immediate world around us, but the world we’re losing and have nearly lost. In poem after poem, he investigates the relationship between humans and animals, humans and the environment, and through that inquiry we discover that our divorce from nature has not only had devastating consequences on the planet, but on our imaginative and moral lives. And while this would depress most to consider, Wunderlich proves ultimately resilient and hopeful and not just for himself, but for his reader. During our discussion, we cover a lot: his childhood, homosexuality and popular culture, his time in New York City, the relationship between animals and humans, his maturation as a poet, he reads and discusses several poems from his latest collection, and so much more. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Kenneth Goldsmith‘s latest book Seven American Deaths and Disasters (powerHouse Books, 2013), a title taken from the series of Warhol paintings by the same name, is a classic book of defamiliarization. By transcribing the words broadcast in real-time by the media’s unscripted response to historical events, Goldsmith brilliantly drains these infamous moments of cliche. Choosing seven critical moments in American history, which all have in common the spectacle of violence and lose, Goldsmith creates a traumatic prose that yields a poetic response to the John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and John Lennon assassinations, the space shuttle Challenger disaster, the Columbine shootings, 9/11, and the death of Michael Jackson. Because we experience public events most often through the media, those events quickly take on the voltage of performance, and Goldsmith takes advantage of this by being the casting director and choosing who will have the speaking roles. In “Seven American Deaths and Disasters”, most often those speaking roles go to the reporters or radio personalities completely unprepared to articulate what they are reporting. As a result, we see how language fails us, saves us, and also indicts us. At times disturbing and emotional, the book let’s us relive and reconsider those historical events again, but in the present, off-screen, and privately. During our chat, we discuss the resistance his work sometimes encounters in the poetry world, the nature of the “genuine”, how this book deviates from his previous work, and Kenneth and I take turns reading passages from his book, and so much more. I hope you enjoy our chat as much as I did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

David Biespiel‘s Charming Gardeners (University of Washington Press, 2013) is unlike any book I’ve read in a long time. Filled with epistolary poems, his book – despite being populated by the poet’s friends and family – is actually a work of great loneliness. In many ways, Biespiel’s journey is America’s, where the road is both a symbol of arrivals, but also departures, and in between is solitude. On the surface, Biespiel’s poems seem like the private meditations of one man. However, his poems encompass each of us, socially and politically, by illuminating our nation’s contradictory character: a longing for enchantment in a disenchanted world. The poems in Charming Gardeners live between the wilderness and the civilized and the poet, finding himself in this zone of uncertainty, does what any of us would do: call out to those we love. In our conversation we discuss his years in Boston and D.C., the Attic Institute in Portland, the poetry wars, and so much more. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Like great critics, the poetry of great editors is often overlooked, but I don’t see how this can be the case with Don Share, whose work is too good to be ignored. A brilliant combination of the public and private, meshed together by a dark intuitive music, his poems brawl in ways that will startle most readers. But isn’t that what we want from poetry: a language true enough to make us vulnerable. The poems in Wishbone are both brooding and sensitive and at times even funny, but perhaps most importantly, Share’s poems are humane. During our chat we talk about his formative years in Boston, his editorial partnership with Christian Wiman at Poetry Magazine, a poet’s identity, and so much more. I hope you enjoy our talk as much as I did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry