Category: Poetry

I picked this book up at the library based mostly on the cover art (a collage by the author) and the back cover blurbs, which talk about how these poems are, in the words of Joshua Marie Wilkinson, “trafficking in the near-spoken, the peculiar particulars, and in the unseen textures of lived experience.” The twenty-three…

I was going to say that “so what?” is the question of this book—it appears twice in “Blizzard” and again in “Your Body Down in Gold”, and I do think there’s something to that. Phillips, in these poems, is concerned with what matters and what doesn’t, with the vagaries of love and desire, with the…

In his Translator’s Introduction to Across the Land and the Water, Iain Galbraith lists some of Sebald’s concerns (in both his poetry and prose) as follows: “borders, journeys, archives, landscapes, reading, time, memory, myth, legend, and the “median state” (Edward Said) of the exile, who is neither fully integrated into the new system nor fully…

Almost Invisible consists almost entirely of paragraph-long prose poems—there’s just one piece, the poem-within-a-poem of “Poem of the Spanish Poet,” that deviates from that form at all. I like prose poems, generally, the way they sometimes could almost be called short-short stories, and I like these prose poems, the way that in bite-sized pieces they…

I’m not opposed to feeling adrift when reading, but this book, on my first read-through of it, made me feel more than adrift: I struggled to find a way in, or anything to hold on to. I haven’t read much by Ashbery: before A Wave I’d only read Notes from the Air, which I remembered…

I read Inger Christensen’s it back in 2007 and don’t remember it very well: I just remember it being difficult, prickly. I picked up this new volume, which is really three volumes in one, as much because of the cover image as anything else. Light and Grass were Christensen’s first books, from 1962 and 1963;…

I haven’t yet read Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor, though I own a copy, but I think that’s OK: I think it’s enough to read The Ada Poems informed just by the quotes from Nabokov that Zarin uses throughout, and by the flap copy, which explains that these poems are “inspired and inhabited by the title…

I didn’t particularly like this book after my first reading of it: it seemed somehow both too strange and too ordinary, with more humor and less beauty than I like the poetry I read to have, but I decided to give it another try. It’s a short book, and maybe part of my problem the…