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“The experience of MATERIAL GIRL begins in a field of distinct flowers—poems are ‘the flowers of associational thinking,’ as Charles Bernstein teaches—each composition held in its own light, which it produces. Can the experiment ‘express our peasant sufferings’? Can the beauty of the language be made to make things clear? ‘Material Girl’ and MATERIAL GIRL abide in and arise from these questions, inhabiting them, moving through them, to the point of noticing, transmitting, ‘the nation’s wild flowers bow gently // around our waists in the open.’ If the thing is that we have to learn how both to inhabit and escape, adore and destroy—well, now I feel sure that this is the thing, because this is what Laura Jaramillo teaches.”—Fred Moten

“Negative Ecstasy. She said it herself and it’s true. Laura Jaramillo’s poems are just short of too smart. Meaning they are too real to critique. Cascading (‘jism from the cock of a cartoon’) they (shake-shake) are it.”—Eileen Myles

“Before Madonna was Monroe, before Monroe, Mina Loy, before Mina Loy, was Laura Jaramillo, who crosscuts a multitude of materialities so that a girl will appear, abject, yet a star, a girl who lives in Italian movies and in Queens, who, knowing her Adorno, is as well a materialist girl, a dazzling embodiment of critical thought and purest longing, awakening to life in and away from the city. True, as she intimates, Manhattan may not exist, but the romance of it lives on in every lyrical, sharp-eyed, exhilarating, witty, and sad line of this marvelous book. Reader, beware: Laura Jaramillo will make you miss New York so much it hurts, even if, especially if, you’ve never been there.”—Joseph Donahue

Laura Jaramillo is a poet from Queens. She is the author of chapbooks The Reactionary Poems (olywa press, 2008) and Civilian Nest (Love Among the Ruins, 2010). MATERIAL GIRL (Subpress, 2012) is her first full-length book of poems. She writes on transnational cinema and immigration at Duke University, where she is pursuing her PhD. Her poems have been translated into Spanish and Persian.

Opinions tend to be uninteresting, which is one of the reasons why I always like reading poet Gary Lenhart’s critical pieces: he gives us far more than thumbs up or thumbs down. In his clean, clear prose, Lenhart comes across as companionable, smart, well-read, alert, and sane. He has no terrible axes to grind and he never lords it over the work under scrutiny. Even on those rare occasions when I disagree with him, I trust his probity, I am delighted by his wit, and I applaud the fact that ultimately he is rooting for everyone to write well.

—Ron Padgett

Gary Lenhart (1947—2021) was the author of five collections of poetry, including Compositions (2010), Father and Son Night (1999), and Light Heart (1991), from Hanging Loose Press. He also wrote The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry and Social Class (University of Michigan Press, 2006). He has contributed poems, essays, and reviews to many magazines and anthologies, and was an editor of the magazines Mag City and Transfer. With Steve Levine, Gregory Masters, and Bob Rosenthal he edited Clinch: Selected Poems of Michael Scholnick (Coffee House Press, 1998) and with Christopher Edgar The Teachers & Writers Guide to Classic American Literarture (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2001). He also edited The Teachers & Writers Guide to William Carlos Williams (1998). He worked at Teachers & Writers Collaborative for 10 years and has taught at Mercy College, LIU-Brooklyn, Columbia University, Community College of Vermont, College for Lifelong Learning, and since 1996 at Dartmouth.

I’m standing in for a huge range of U.S. readers and writers for whom Rob Holloway’s work will be a delightful surprise—and a challenge, for we’re not used to a meditative, analytical poetry with this many moving parts. The first thing I notice about Permit is how verb-based it is; I get the sense of a swift creek scudding across stones, and the stones are the verbs making the whole thing happen. With his narrative continually shredding itself, dressing and undressing in a single motion, Holloway creates a society of underplayed males dominated by his incomparable heroine Pam, who, like Oedipa Maas in San Francisco, wanders through and activates a London tragic, gorgeous, and numinous as life itself. So I’m telling you, Rob Holloway’s poetry will open your eyes—and then some.

—Kevin Killian

Rob Holloway is a poet and teacher living in London, England. His first chapbook, American Heroines, was published by Writers Forum in 1999, followed by Permit: A Sampler (2000) and Permit IV (Spanner, 2002). Permit is his first book. His work has appeared in the magazines Mirage #4/Period(ical), Tongue to Boot, Kenning, Tolling Elves, and Axolotl and online in How 2, onedit, Pores, and past simple. From November 2002 to March 2004, he hosted the poetry radio show Up for Air on Resonance FM. In 2004, he launched the poetry CD label Stem, publishing CDs by Maggie O’Sullivan, Allen Fisher, Peter Manson, and Leslie Scalapino. A chapbook of new work, Mortmain, is forthcoming from Stem in 2009.

Steve Carey had the loveliest poetry voice I’ve ever encountered. When Steve sat down to write, all negativity dropped away and there was nothing left but this awed, shaping, most musical voice, informed by the negative in life and in his own character, but flying gently above it. Read this selection of his poems and hear the sound of his impartial—outside school or faction (nowhere but the present)—love of the art.

—Alice Notley

Steve Carey’s Selected Poems reminds you he’s been here all the time. Poems of oxymoronic elan, motility with inertia, the heartfelt and the facetious, the sweet and the defensively tart. He reserves the right, occasionally, to step in and out of role. His diction is exacting and his writerly stance is up to any date. A fellow-traveling Zen monk, he sees first his own world, and then the world, with intellect and irony. He’s on the map—you could look it up.

—John Godfrey

Steve Carey was born in Washington, D.C., in 1945 and published seven collections of poetry before his death in 1989. “Steve,” an essay on his life and writing, can be found in Alice Notley’s Coming After: Essays on Poetry. The Selected Poems of Steve Carey is the first book in over twenty years to make Carey’s work widely available.

Edited by Edmund Berrigan.

One might argue that Rothschild s thesis in Theogony could be reduced to That which is not there is all that is the case. Although the book collects poems from as far back as 1997, it is a volume profoundly about the events of September 11, 2001 from the perspective of someone who lived in close proximity to the fallen towers.

—Ron Silliman, Silliman’s blog

My favorite book of poems for 2009 so far. And a long time a-coming. But finally here it is: as close as possible to a Douglas Rothschild Collected. The pleasure of Theogony starts in the hand: the square format, perfectly suited to the work, and the pleasant, solid, yet casual heft of its 210 pages.

—Pierre Joris, Nomadics

About the Author
Douglas Rothschild’s life has been one long miasma of failure, disappointment, coffee & overarching desire. Though he has not yet accomplished anything of note, Mr. Rothschild intends to continue on for some time yet. Some of this life, such as it is, has been chronicled in Bill Luoma’s Works and Days and Jennifer Moxley’s The Middle Room.

Benjamin Friedlander speaks with ungainsayable clarity of what we had thought to forget

—Robert Creeley

Is melancholy good? I think Ben Friedlander has the moodiest ear for it in the field, and wit to match. Where he takes this immodest gift is to a tangled interstice where idiom intersects with the body’s fault lines. Uncannily the reader has almost had these thoughts. The attraction feels sideways, vertiginous. We receive, with these poems, the shapeliness of tact. Then suddenly he shows us the tax we pay to Rome

—Lisa Robertson

As a poet, scholar, editor, and translator, Benjamin Friedlander has dedicated more than half a lifetime to rigorously engaging with the concepts and practices of contemporary poetry, and this much-wished-for book provides a beginning survey of that commitment. Gathered here are poems from the first ten years of his wide-ranging, critically probing, and intellectually ambitious poetic project. This book will amaze, defy, and remind again how not to be made complacent by what poetry offers

—Alan Gilbert

In his earliest books of poetry, collected here from 1984-1994, Ben Friedlander constructed an argument–not simply an argument for postwar lyric poetry, but an argument for the relevance, even survival, of a poetic urge that casts its long shadow into all corners of art.

—Rob Fitterman

Moxley’s detailed and lushly-written memoir is set largely in San Diego and follows her life thus far from childhood to marriage. Consistently focused on poetry and poets, it dwells on the curious ways Americans now find their way into the literary life. “There was a secret force deep in my psyche which, like a Cold War double agent, worked in tandem with my insecurity, a sort of wicked interior spy that emerged at the most inopportune moments to make sport of all my fears and fill me with crippling self-doubt as regards my natural fitness to live the life of the mind”—from the text.

Jennifer Moxley teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Maine. Her books of poetry include Imagination Verses, Often Capital, The Sense Record and The Line.

Harrison’s practice in Os is coherent both in modulation and argument—not a modest achievement given certain habits of our radically inclined. Out of the dense corners his poems inhabit or perform—indeed, as “red horses / drink their fields in finished sentences”—the poems travel a familiar defiance, to the degree that their particular instance of manufacture remains largely difficult to ascertain. However, the mood is as immersive as it is prepared to situate and make links in definition of larger claims to reverse or bifurcate the assumptions of our social identities and the rhetorical representations that make them a liability.

—Roberto Tejada

Roberto Harrison was born in Oregon to Panamanian parents; he and his family moved to Panama when he was a year old, and then to Delaware in 1969. Harrison pursued studies in mathematics and computer science as an undergraduate; after a year of graduate work in mathematics at Indiana University, Bloomington, he traveled in the United States, Europe, and North Africa. His collections of poetry include Counter Daemons (2006), Os (2006), elemental song (2006), reflector (2008), and Urracá (2009).

Camille Guthrie transposes the pastoral themes of the medieval Unicorn Tapestries with those of modern, urban life in an ingenious reimagining of both. Amidst her flora and fauna we encounter a lookout, a boyfriend, informants, hunters, poets, and a rock star—all fresh translations of familiar figures. Here the unicorn becomes a blank figure for the beloved, knowledge, and vision. The allegory of the hunt becomes the pursuit of the elusive prey of meaning. As in The Master Thief (Subpress, 2000), Guthrie agilely uses traditional and modern poetic forms. These fearless poems invite the reader to be startled by ideas and ambushed by beauty.

Camille Guthrie’s sharp eye for lyric detail, her use of shifting connections, narrative fragments, quotations, and demarcations have produced a haunting and powerful collection of meditations. This sequence is the work of an impressive new voice in American poetry.

—Susan Howe

A captivating composition. A loving trap.

—C. D. Wright

Camille Guthrie is the author of the poetry books Articulated Lair (2013), In Captivity (2006), and The Master Thief (2000) (all Subpress books), and the chapbooks Defending Oneself (Beard of Bees, 2004) and People Feel with Their Hearts in Another Instance: Three Chapbooks (Instance Press, 2011). Born in Seattle, she has lived in Pittsburgh and Brooklyn. She holds degrees from Vassar College and from the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Brown University. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and on web sites, including Arsenal, Art and Artists:Poems, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, No: A Journal of the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and The White Review. She raises two children with her husband in upstate New York and teaches literature at Bennington College.

Follow Camille Guthrie on Twitter: @GuthrieCamille

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.
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