Issue 14 – Summer 2008 – Recent & Notable

Recent & Notable 

 

David Mutschlecner, Sign. (Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 2007). 84pp. Working at the edge of the desert, real and metaphorical, Sign creates a distinctive voice and a distinctive sensibility haunted as it is by visionary possibility. Using a spare, taut idiom, David Mutschlecner’s poetry achieves a rare communion with a vision of transformative longing. –Jon Thompson

 

Dawn-Michelle Baude, The Flying House. (West Lafayette, Indiana: Parlor Press/Free Verse Editions, 2008). 121 pp. The Flying House is published in the series I edit, but don’t just take it from me. Alice Notley says of it: “Dawn-Michelle Baude’s The Flying House—written in many countries (“sites”) and including some ten years of work—reads like a long poem with its unifying themes of place and impermanence, permanent violence, [and] traces of the past. . . . The elegant, open-field line casts over the page like a lace net—Pausanias as if something psychically earth-shaking actually happened while living the guide book that is now our ancient history. The music, a fast line, pulls the reader forward by the throat. This is a beautiful, puzzling, sad, and fascinating book.”

 

Matthew Cooperman, Daze. (Cambridge: Salt, 2006).108 pp. “Moments in Daze are so delicate and then round the corner comes the stab, the surprise, the knowing frippery and twinkle-eyed nudge. The poems do daze, they dazz; they does. No other poet has such panache and such beauty: something pure in a heart can hide.”—D.A. Powell

 

Charles Wright, Littlefoot: A Poem. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). 87 pp. Littlefoot contains Wright’s trademark ruminations on the nature of mortality; in this collection, they take place over the course of a single year, the poet’s seventieth. Rueful, reverential, and sharp-eyed in its metaphoric inventiveness, Littlefoot examines the limits of language to signify the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.—Jon Thompson

 

[PREV][NEXT]