Publisher
The Sonnets
poems by Sandra Simonds
from Bloof Books
I love the poems of Sandra Simonds (like, here’s one from Everyday Genius), and so can you. This is a great book. I tore through it. Am tearing through it. That’s not a nice way to put it. I love these poems. I love the way they combine ordinary moments but make them strange with language.
“isn’t that what’s / awesome about being an American poet? / You can just take your ignorance / and run with it or rename it bravado.”
Wastoid
poems by Mathias Svalina
from Big Lucks Books
I just got this beauty in the mail. It’s poems. It’s sonnets, even. But they are in paragraphs. The book is called Wastoid and every poem in there is also called Wastoid. Guess they didn’t want to wastoid any time doing up new titles. (The acknowledgments notes that the title was inspired by a metal band from Lincoln, NE, named Wasteoid.)
This is a pretty hefty book, at 154 pages. Sara Woods made the cover. It’s beautiful.
Most of the poems begin “My lover is” something.
the obligatory garnish argument
by Meg Ronan
from Spring Gun Press
Meg Ronan sent this to me months ago, but when it arrived I was moving and it was packed up before I even knew what it was.
What it is is the obligatory garnish argument, which sounds like the best Guns n Roses album ever. Not that, though. Instead it is a book of little tiny word nuggets to rearrange your mindspace, like:
the obligatory garnish argument
this glob drought requires
liberal sub-global oxygen garden policy
here, take all my cable knits
Which is writing I like a lot, lot, but me personally I cannot read many in one sitting even though they’re not long and the book is not long. (Are there patterns to these pieces? How were they composed?) But Ronan, smart, inserts what I take to be found text that plays with the “are you still reading this” trope of tl;dr patterns. That’s what this book is! It’s a question about reading. “If you’re still reading this you’re pretty serious about your car audio.” It’s a thing about endurance. It’s a question about beauty.
“Don’t read any further.” “Stop suffering.”
the obligatory garnish argument
born for this barging this constant charitable
luxury mirage more serious shards please
change me for the ragged flora and the boredom
I don’t endure poems like that! I refresh myself with them. Poems like that hand me back the thoughts I had that I didn’t get. I like what Sandra Doller says in her blurb, “What happens when text is filtered through the meaning machine? What will stem the exhausting tide of linguistic proliferation?” This! Henry Miller referred to “the sieve through which my anarchy strains, resolves itself into words.”
The Harbour Beyond the Movies
by Luke Kennard
from Salt Publishing
My brother got me this book for Christmas, off my Amazon wish list. I didn’t even know I had one of those. But when I opened this present at Christmastime I was surprised that he’d gotten me such a deep-cut poetry book, something from 2007. That’s when he explained the wish list.
I put it on the wish list because Mairéad Byrne had Luke Kennard blurb her book, The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven, so I wanted to see what his stuff is like.
I like it a lot, of what I’ve read so far, which is a couple poems. Thanks bro!
Quarry Light
fiction by Claudia Smith
from Magic Helicopter Press
The mailman just dropped this off. It looks great. The design, inside is out, is excellent. There are six stories in the 120 page book. The cover painting is elegant. I just looked at the copyright page and there is a lot of information on it. On the back, MHP’s helicopter logo has fully grown on me.
A couple Barthelmes blurbed it. Steven said you should reckon with and celebrate her talent. Frederick said the stories are frightening and heartbreaking. Elizabeth Ellen said Claudia Smith is able to make you thirteen and terrified of everything.
I haven’t read it yet but maybe I’ll save it until when the power goes out on some stormy night this winter.
Gigantic Failures
by Mark Anthony Cronin
from Small Victories Press
Doesn’t this book look awesome? It’s a collection of nine stories. The title pages for each story has a really cool drawing on it. One of the stories is called “Daedelus, the Bastard!” It begins, “The neighbors god damn kid shot the swimming pool with his BB gun, Rodney Cafner notices as he’s taking out the trash.”
The stories are great, the book looks great and fits nicely in your hand and I’m not just saying that because Mark let me layout the pages. I can’t wait to finish reading this book and then see what’s next with Cronin and Small Victories.
Collected Adult Lessons
by Amy McDaniel
from 421 Press
Here collected are fourteen poems, three from Amy McDaniel’s original chapbook Selected Adult Lessons (Agnes Fox 2010) and eleven previously uncollected—all great. Presented in oversized size for easy reading, some of the poems are long and some are short. Sometimes the poems make their own jokes and, like in the Guided Meditation, sometimes they ask you to make the joke or for your best facts about animals.
Wait, what are your best facts about animals? Somehow I know that dogs are six times faster than I am.
I’m proud of this book because Amy let me help with the design, and all the elements of what makes a book a book were called into question and dealt with accordingly. For instance, since there are only fourteen poems we numbered the poems instead of the pages.
Check it out for $5 here.
Figures for an Apocalypse
by Edward Mullany
from Publishing Genius
This book blows my mind. It is 200 pages of vsf, in which every story is essential. I have read it cover to cover many times in the last year, starting in August 2012 while camping with my family. It hasn’t changed much since then, but it still feels new every time.
I just flipped around in the book, pretending I’d just bought a copy and wanted to see what it was all about. I used the contents page (the TOC is 6 pages long) and just went to the stories that I thought would be the most interesting. I dabbled around that way.
Sometimes I’d come upon a story and think, like, Well, that story just seems whatever. For instance, the story on page 39 goes:
There was a telephone on a table in a hall.
It started ringing.
“Can you get that?” a woman called.
You know? I certainly think those are good sentences and the last word “called” in this context is interesting, but over the course of a 200 page book, the so-called “story” is not really all that compelling, right?
Then I looked at the title again, which is, “The Police” and I came to realize how much is being offered. Are the police calling? Is the woman and whoever she’s speaking to a cop? The police suggest a crisis. Like, my first thought was, maybe the police are there interviewing the woman about something, and she calls out to her husband, who is getting everyone coffee, to answer the phone. Maybe their child is missing and it’s the ransom guy. I don’t know! Don’t look at me! Look at the book!
Time Magazine
edited by Nancy Gibbs
from Time Inc.
This has a great “10 Questions” interview with Andre Agassi in it. About his serve, he says, “It’d be easier for me to hit 114 on the nose than to give me five tries to hit 68. There’s not a circumstance in the world where I’d hit a 68-m.p.h. serve.”
Even Though I Don’t Miss You
by Chelsea Martin
from Short Flight/Long Drive
This book came with perfect timing, right as I’m about to get on the bus for a semi-long drive to NYC. It takes 3.5 hours. I figure I can read Chelsea’s book four times.
I think it will be kind of sad but also really funny.
The first time I ever saw anything about Chelsea Martin, she was putting condoms on her legs in a video. It was 2008. I have all her books. Her website is www.jerkethics.com.
