Recent & Notable
Peter Riley’s Due North (Shearsman Books, 2015). Using an “open field” form structure often identified with Ezra Pound, Robert Duncan and Charles Olson, Riley re-examines the legacies of “Northernness” as an economic and cultural legacy. While the form here is formally more expansive than his earlier work, Riley returns to an examination of what has been lost, left behind and forgotten about in contemporary Britain, indeed in contemporary Europe.–Jon Thompson
L.S. Klatt, Sunshine Wound (Parlor Press, 2015). Klatt’s world is indeed a wounded world but it is equally a world of sunshine, not merely light but “sunshine” in the sense that Klatt appreciates the commodified, peculiarly cheerful American “take” on experience and he finds in it all kinds of interesting depths (and surfaces). These are surreal, strange, deeply passionate poems that in their thoughtfulness resist the simplifications of our culture.–Jon Thompson
Jorie Graham, From the New World: Poems 1976-2014 (Ecco, 2015). Extended meditations on the tension between the body and the spirit in a world that defines– or wants to define them. Erudite, worldly, and deeply meditative, Graham’s poetry excels by matching an intensity of perception with a formal audacity which seems to continually dare itself to new heights. This is the poetry of a master stylist.–Jon Thompson
Claudia Rankine, Citizen. In the tradition of W.E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, Rankine’s hybrid text addresses the rage, despair and melancholia created by contemporary racism. Rankine’s focus is America, but the scope of the book goes beyond American borders. Citizen is a book that powerfully addresses itself to language’s aw(e)ful power of address.–Jon Thompson