“Max Winter’s poems are full of the permission of comedy and the precision of laughter. He is urbane, witty, and a New York poet, though that appellation doesn’t capture his eccentric grace, or his way of slipping to the center of another world by anaphora. He is one head of the perennially new generation of surrealists, infra-sub-realists, visceral as John Ashbery; what matters to both is drawing of the body, exploration of a mind. Such play is a foretaste of Heaven.”
—David Shapiro
Read a poem from Walking Among Them that appeared here in Verse Daily.
Max Winter’s first book, The Pictures, was published by Tarpaulin Sky Press in 2007. He has published reviews in The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. He is one of the poetry editors of Fence Magazine, and he co-edits the press Solid Objects.
In her third collection of poetry, Camille Guthrie engages with Louise Bourgeois’s deeply personal sculptures, paintings, and drawings in her own taut, emotive abstractions, carving new meaning out of a body of work central to twentieth-century art. The poet converses with the artist’s preoccupations with love, alienation, sex, death, and identity. These poems offer a formally precise, playfully intense perspective—an essential vocabulary for monumental works.
As Susan Wheeler observes, “Like Louise Bourgeois, Camille Guthrie makes great art from great discomfort. […] The rigor of Bourgeois’s inner life and studio practice supports these beautiful improvisations like an armature over which a billowing fabric drapes.”
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.
This work was commissioned by Isabella d’Este for the walls of her studiolo after she attended a daylong screening of Matthew Barney’s Creemaster at The Roxy in Brixton, London, and a few weeks later stumbled upon an artist’s talk by Raphael on Ed Rushca’s painting “They Called Her Styrene.” However, it was her experiences that same evening in a karaoke bar off Oxford Street that convinced her to go through with her planned idea and to approach a writer who could carry out her design for a bar rock pastel. At the time of the commission the patron was herself concerned with the plight of deer on the roads of Europe and North America and was an ardent campaigner for the introduction of sonic deer deterrents based on installations pioneered by Max Neuhaus. In a drawing, now unfortunately lost, and in this written description (for the first time available here within the text of a popular edition) she details her request for a masque of grotesque pastoral and mythic proportions, a cloven poetics that would feature commerical activity to be streamed live on the walls of her studiolo. She similarly required the inclusion of players as ordinary citizens—or often as ordinary citizens as artists—”got up in devious animal brocade,” to perform whatever forms of cultural consumption, display and collection they encountered over the duration of their everyday experience, all this for her personal entertainment and meditative consolation. D’Este paid for the work upfront safe in the knowledge that she had purchased a piece of poetic invention in which even the title was against itself.
Photo by Drew Milne.
Redell Olsen’s publications include Film Poems (Les Figues Press, 2014), Punk Faun: A Bar Rock Pastel (Subpress, 2012), Secure Portable Space (Reality Street, 2004), Book of the Fur (rem press, 2000), and the collaboratively produced Here Are My Instructions (Redell Olsen / Susan Johanknecht) (Gefn, 2004). Her film poems, and texts for performance and film, include: Bucolic Picnic (or, toile de jouy camouflage) (2009), Newe Booke of Copies (2009-10), Lost Pool (2010), and SPRIGS & spots (2011-12). From 2006-2010 she was the editor of How2, the international journal for modernist and contemporary poetry and poetics by women writers. She is the director for the MA in Poetic Practice at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.
“Kimberly Lyons wants to ‘stay with the poem in this uncomfortable singular place / Where the flies and moths co-exist.’ It is hard to listen when ‘The poems says: / You can’t have any lobster, you stupid, hungry poet.’ But that is exactly what the poet does. Instead of shutting the world out, she follows the sounds wherever they take her. ‘I abide / one who abets / a lady’s maid.’ It makes for an intricate music, a teasing out of possibilities. These are the poet’s ‘restorative analects.’ This is a book to read again and again.”—John Yau
“Kimberly Lyons cracks open the primordial egg from which all creation originates. What issues from it: ‘glossy first milk / of time,’ an ‘aromatic hem,’ ‘the discharging thread,’ ‘a / kind of channel / a crystal / edge of the knife,’ ‘a stich of blue / for heating flame.’ Lyons’s absolutely magical reckoning with the world is as generative and hallucinatory as it is generous and honest. Thus The Practice of Residue pours out from its mythic eggshell the lost traces of amniotic fluid that every reader needs if she is to realize and be realized: divination becomes ‘a binding condensation.’ The only possible response to this poetry is gratitude and love.”—Elizabeth Robinson
Kimberly Lyons is the author of several books of poetry including Rogue (Instance Press, 2012), The Practice of Residue (Subpress, 2012), Photothérapique (Katalanché Press/Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2008), Saline (Instance Press, 2005), and Abracadabra (Granary Books, 2000). Asterisk 12 (fewer and further Press, 2012) is an issue of her work in broadside form. She is the publisher of Lunar Chandelier Press and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
“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.
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.
