War, the Musical condenses the written, visual, musical and interpretational aspects of the musical form into a small well-compiled book. Robert Fitterman and Dirk Rowntree have produced an ingenious collection of images, blank pages text and sheet music that can be examined in many ways. War, the Musical reads as a flipbook, allowing the carefully selected images to pass by you like a lively drama. Upon careful examination this collection has a plot and a score to accompany it. It is a wonderful, multi-faceted innovation in the written word. From Publishers Weekly Combining the cut-and-paste graphic art and radical typesetting of artist Rowntree with texts that poet Fitterman (Metropolis) has found, altered and composed, this hybrid work orchestrates a multiplicity of voices singing out against an ever changing backdrop. The result is a book that harmonizes the contradictions between lines like “all you can/ think about is there’s/ someone out there// trying to kill you or/ your buddy” and “Hunter satisfaction is of the utmost importance to us.” Rowntree offers up a profusion of incongruous yet moving scenes and figures. The text reads like spliced Internet chatter presented with strategic orthographic alterations. As elements repeat, they produce the disorienting sense of a business-as-usual homefront (“1 made the cheerleading squad 6ecause 1 yelled the cheer as loud as 1 could”) obliterating a real war with a mouse click. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved....
This is Joe Elliot’s second collection of pitch-perfect poems. Opposable Thumb is essential reading. In these poems, Joe Elliot brings a whopping arsenal of technique to the table to create a sumptuous feast of meaning without equal signs or slashes…Here, song is thought. It all rings true. Essential the way mindfulness is essential. Enjoy the view —Mitch Highfill How has the world limped along for so long without Joe Elliot’s new book? If you want to relearn language, please read these poems, which release the kinetic potential of the page like toasters dropped into bathtubs —Marcella Durand A fixture on the New York poetry scene for more than 20 years, Elliot’s massively summative debut is as rigorous as it is loose, and casual as it is elegant. Each of these nearly 50 poems, grouped into four sections, progresses not so much by telling stories as describing several events, on a tiny scale, at once: “A Godzilla statuette steps/ crushing grey offices at the far// end of a bar. Next to it in a 3-piece/ suit a gratuitously rude// drunk sways, points his palm/ corder at a man who// is paid to expertly slice/ a variety of fish and smile// evenly.” Over the course of the book, Elliot’s speaker takes “a slow roll through Baltimore,” chooses a fork “In Orlando when the day of the dead finally arrived” and finds that “Super-model-dom is to dungarees as attitude is to thought.” But one-liners are not the point. As Elliot’s observations accrue, a portrait emerges of a singular consciousness driven by a wry, subtle, detective-like love for its time and...
The Black Warrior and Other Poems showcases Lauture’s powerfully unadorned verse. Strands of French and Creole dot the surface of this mostly English-language work, evoking both Lauture’s Haitian origins and present-day realities as a politically engaged college professor in the Bronx. Denizé Lauture’s poetry uses simple words that create striking and unexpected images carrying the light and the freshness of the air of the high altitudes where he was born and cannot forget, with the intent of helping to change an unjust society. Thus, his poetry is functional in order to awaken those stuck in lethargic indifference. —Franck Laraque About the Author Denizé Lauture, first born of 13 peasant children, migrated to the US from Haiti in 1968. He is a professor of French and Spanish at St Thomas Aquinas College in Sparkill and lives in the Bronx. Lauture writes in Creole, English, and French. He is the author of Blues of the Lightning Metamorphosis, Father and Son, Running the Road to ABC, Mothers and Daughters, The Curse of the Poet, and When the Denizen Weeps....
In his new collection of poetry, Daniel Bouchard responds to our contemporary dystopia with exacting description and incisive criticism. The cognitive dissonance between what we are in daily life and what we know about the history we inhabit in America: this is the matter of this book. It is laid out in such a way that we can see what our minds are made of, and study the problem. Here the rhetoric of new poetry (“Hades faces environmental crises”) is at ease with both beauty and corruption. —Fanny Howe From Publishers Weekly New England land-, sea- and cityscapes draw reinforcement from blue-state frustration and aggression in this smart, energetic, original second collection. Bouchard (Diminutive Revolutions) first surveys coastlines and towns where winter and spring unsettle the citizens: “We have mockingbird/ for neighbor I wonder/ what his rent is.” Soon enough, though, the collection merges its descriptive interests with invective against bad writers and bad world leaders: after September 11, Bouchard says, “Where we trudged along to disaster/ Now we shall sprint.” Bouchard’s mix of slippery forms and obvious anger lands him in heretofore unknown—and clearly productive—territory halfway between Juvenal and James Schuyler, between ancient ideas of poets as stern social critics and newer investigations of language’s roots. Bouchard may be best known for editing the provocative poetry-and-criticism journal The Poker, and his poems do give familiar certainties and worldly powers a poke in the eye. Just as impressive as their intellectual efforts, though, is the dry lyricism that underlies them, in which Bouchard shows us not just what he believes, but why he feels as he does,...
