Sublurbia

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Blurb 88 (special entry - RIP Bill Knott)

Bill Knott died on Tuesday, March 11, 2014.

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Blurb 87

"Gabbert strikes a perfect balance between heart and head, between cleverness and earnestness, between language that demonstrates its own fallibility and language that is surprisingly perfectly precise."

Make Magazine on The Self Unstable by Elisa Gabbert (Black Ocean Press, 2013).

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Blurb 86

"Jenn McCreary's wry, disarming, dream-imbued reformulations of fairy-tale & folk-tale quests in & now my feet are maps make for an unconventionally pleasurable and challenging read. In point of fact, she turns the conventions of fantasy-inflected diction and dispiriting roles for female characters in on themselves, in large part through as subtle a handling of poetic sequencing and tone as I've encountered anywhere lately. These poems vividly remake the ground they take from a range of familiar sources, are addressed to readers of most ages, and do mean to change the way this world's collective sense of imagination knows itself."

Anselm Berrigan blurbing on Jenn McCreary's & now my feet are maps (Dusie Press, 2013)

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Blurb 85

"The poet William Blake invited us 'to see the world in a grain of sand.' In Cinematic Reveries, a haunting, exquisitely sensitive collection of prose poems, Linda C. Ehrlich invites us to contemplate a vast array of deeply rooted, evocative images that have the power to release us from the tyranny of quotidian reality. Inspired by film and a wide range of readings, this collection will prompt you to look at children, Jerusalem, Chaplin, Garbo, and even the Wicked Witch of the West in ways you never imagined. It also will inspire you to embrace the images that have long lingered in your own life."

Arthur Noletti, Jr., on Linda C. Ehrlich's Cinematic Reveries: Gestures, Stillness, Water (Peter Lang, 2013)

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Blurb 84

"'loaded arc' is so fine it will rain owls and fathers."

Bernadette Mayer's micro-blurb on Laura Goldstein's book loaded arc (Trembling Pillow Press, 2013)

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Blurb 83

"The poems in John Gallaher's The Future of Love are deceptively quiet and simple in the way that a pet chimpanzee is deceptively docile. One minute the chimp is running around in his little cowboy suit, looking every bit like a human child at play; the next, he's viciously attacking the next door neighbor over a cupcake. Still, I love chimpanzees; they're frighteningly like us, and I love these poems; they're frighteningly like our dreams, only better, because we get to carry them around in this beautiful book."

-Christopher Kennedy, blurbing on John Gallaher's The Future of Love (Salt Hill, 2013; Dead Lake Chapbook Series #1)

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Blurb 82

"'An ethics occurs at the edge / of what we know,' writes Brenda Hillman, and you can consider this plump volume an encyclopedia of things worth knowing: places, species, but also passions, ideas, rays of light and barrels of poison. For by 'environment' we mean the world of tangible things and a way of thinking systematically: this book deepens your relationship to both those things and is a pleasure besides."

Rebecca Solnit on The Ecopoetry Anthology (eds. Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street, Trinity University Press, 2013).

...free front-cover blurb from Edward Hirsch in the photo...

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Blurb 81

"Each entry in Diary of Use consists of a quiet surreal force that feels so near and remote at once but always acutely in sync with the fractures of language, memories, loss. J. Vera Lee documents in each entry a tiny world of curious beauty and intoxicating chatter, a crystallized world of incompleteness."

Don Mee Choi on J. Vera Lee's Diary of Use (Tinfish Press, 2013)

ISBN 9780982440348

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Blurb 80

"In Gossamurmur we see a master poet in the throes of the performance of a lifetime. Waldman rolls out technology, fantasy, wit, nature, passion, and luscious fields of rapturous information for our temporary perusal, and then with her magic stylus flicks it away. Her poet is paranoid, funny, friendly, and lusty, and all her wide passages of poethood, personhood, and history are cinched by a streaming network of lines that refresh, quake and accrue. The trembling suppleness of this poem creates a living miniature of the mythic 'archive of poetry' which for Waldman is the holy grail -- the deep subject of this wildly successful poem which she defends like a fire-breathing dragon by becoming it."

-Eileen Myles, on Anne Waldman's Gossamurmur (Penguin, 2013)

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Blurb 79

"The Cineaste is the announcement of the birth of an entirely new poetics. A. Van Jordan brings the art of film and the art of poetry together in a virtuoso act of passion. This work goes beyond memorable speech into an articulation of the spirit, the hunger, the enchantment and terror of a nation and a time. In unforgettably resonant pieces this poetry creates a whole. This is one of our most important poets doing perhaps his own most important work of a lifetime."

Laura Kasischke on A. Van Jordan's The Cineaste (W.W. Norton, 2013).

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Blurb 78

In A Messenger Comes, the poet's spirit is broken by her grief. Beautifully rich and emotionally engaging, this is no simple book of consolation. In its steadfast beauty, it is a book of questions: can grief be sustained? What can we learn from the grief of another? She has lost her sister & her father; what could we possibly say to console her? Can we know another's grief? What if grieving is not something we should get over? What are the connections between grief & memory? How does a poem intensify our memory of the ones we have lost? Lost to what? Thus this is a messenger we will want & need to welcome time & again. A harrowing & inspiring book of poems!

--Hank Lazer, on Rachel Tzvia Back's A Messenger Comes (Singing Horse Press, 2012)

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Blurb 77

"Cole Swensen's Stele goes forth with an artful, graceful balancing as in a minuet, stopping, bowing, and then moving towards new thought. This reading 'presumes a crossing' of empty space in each line. This gap is a telling while it's occurring. The interval grows until it changes how one reads the work. Simple rhythmic constraints of diction and of space construct a fluid but uneven chiasm where one begins to read down and across at the same time, two eerily different musical scores. Sophisticated, in a refined, unhurried measure, the more Stele gains restraint, the more ardent it becomes." - Norma Cole on Cole Swensen's Stele (Post-Apollo Press, 2012).

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Blurb 76

"In the work of P. Inman 'the dialectic of sound and silence has moved several logical steps beyond Beckett'" -- Joan Retallack, "Post-scriptum-high-modern."

Inman "destabilizes the polarities of form & content.... By fully semanticizing the so-called nonsemantic features of langue, Inman creates a dialectic of the recuperable & the unreclaimable, where what cannot be claimed is nonetheless most manifest." --Charles Bernstein, Artifice of Absorption

Found on the back cover of P. Inman's per se (Burning Deck, 2012)

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Blurb 75

"Meme is a haunted work. We are ushered in by the disembodied voice of a mother figure, scolding and teasing in the time-stamped slang of past decades. The anachronism is both funny and terribly sad. 'Don't come in here all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,' the voice says. And it turns out that's fair warning. This cracked Virgil leads us into a consciously Dantean underworld ('Had you entered the thicket in darkness / ...Had you been mid-life, not in haze but in crisis?'). Wheeler has created a total (and to me terrifying) linguistic environment in which hell is the introjected voices of other people, the hungry ghosts of our recent past."

-Rae Armantrout's blurb for Meme, by Susan Wheeler (University of Iowa Press, Kuhl House Poets Series, 2012)

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Blurb 74

"A stunning meditation on the body we live in, Detailing Trauma wraps love tight to life, insisting we prepare for the departure of both."

Terese Svoboda's blurb on Arianne Zwartjes' Detailing Trauma: A Poetic Anatomy (University of Iowa Press, 2012)

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Blurb 73 (Sunday Brunch Edition) (AWP Miniseries #38)

"Barbara Guest has created a textually saturated poetry that embodies the transient, the ephemeral, and the flickering in translucent surfaces of contingent connections. These poems unravel before us so that we may revel in them, find for ourselves, if we go unprepared, the dwelling that they beckon us to inhabit." - Charles Bernstein

"Reading Barbara Guest's Collected Works is like sitting on the very edge of time, as each poem, each book, seems to surpass its own expectations, forging and inventing in a ceaseless renovation of poetic energies. Barbara Guest envisioned, for generations to come, a future for lyric poetry." - Ann Lauterbach

...both blurbs for The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest (Wesleyan, 2008)

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Blurb 72 (AWP Miniseries 37)

"From public statues to photos of soldiers in Iraq, from physical object to recorded history, from what statues see to drone observation logs: Osman invites us, with George Oppen, to see the things we live among - and to know ourselves."

Rosmarie Waldrop's blurb on Jena Osman's Public Figures (Wesleyan UP, 2012)