Recent & Notable
C.D. Wright , One with Others (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2010). Who else can make such unpredictable, stirring, original poetry out of such seemingly un-poetic material? C.D. Wright is continuing to invent new poetry and new ways of hearing history. The collection is grounded in Arkansas during the tensions of the Civil Rights Movement, but this is a drama with a story that goes back to Thebes, to Sophocles’ Antigone.—Jon Thompson
Brian Teare , Pleasure (Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 2010). “Brian Teare’s Pleasure takes upon itself the important work of remembering that Adam is for us still the erotic source from which words work their awful magic—a magic that can return to life a lover slowly dying, a lover lost to death, the page as the impossible paradise of continued life. I know of no other poet right now returning his readers with such fervent beauty and stark intelligence into the very difficulty of the words in which he writes[…]—Dan Beachy-Quick
Ashur Etwebi , Poems from Above the Hill & Selected Work , Translated by Brenda Hillman and Diallah Hader. (Anderson, SC: Parlor Press/Free Verse Editions, 2011). The Libyan physician-poet Ashur Etwebi writes a meditative poetry in which the vivid colors of the Mediterranean are combined with a consciousness of yearning for that which history makes impossible. Dreamlike, exquisitely-poised and calm, Etwebi’s voice takes in the strangeness of a world in which nothing, ultimately, is strange. [To be released in February, 2011). —Jon Thompson
Anne Carson , Nox. (New York: New Directions, 2010). “ The book is an extraordinary object to behold, and more extraordinary to read, but it’s hardly accurate to even call it a ‘book.’ It’s perhaps 10 feet of paper, folded accordion-like, displaying as near a reproduction of Carson’s original collage journal as is possible. The whole thing is folded and packed into a beautiful gray box….The result is breathtaking, evidence of visionary publishing at a moment when the book business is increasingly cynical.” (Publishers Weekly )