Category: Books

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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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 place: “The sound of a trumpet being/ practiced two floors below. Pushing a cat-like presence aside/ to get at it.” (Dec.)
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About the Author

Joe Elliot lives in New York City.

Selected by Juliana Spahr for Subpress, MOHAWK/SAMOA: TRANSMIGRATIONS draws on the songs and stories of two geographically distant cultures to create a unique poetic collaboration. By writing beautifully spare new poems that stem out of each other’s translations from Mohawk and Samoan, James Thomas Stevens and Caroline Sinavaiana have ” created] an exciting mesh where Mohawk and Samoan inform each other to erase boundaries between individual and collective, past and present, inner and outer worlds.” —Arthur Sze

“Mohawk / Samoa Transmigrations is a slender project for a perfect-bound book, containing really just eight short poems apiece by James Thomas Stevens & Caroline Sinavaiana, but it also is quite a bit more than that. What that is lies all in the setting. Stevens is an Akwesasne Mohawk poet, teaching now at SUNY Fredonia. Sinavaiana is a Samoan-born poet, teaching now at the University of Hawai’i, spending half of each year on O’ahu, but the remainder of it in Dharamsala, India, where I believe she is involved in the large Tibetan Buddhist community in exile there. —Ron Silliman.

See more of Silliman’s review here

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

See Denizé Lauture’s other Subpress book, a kiss to the land, here

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

A dynamic, serious book, exactingly descriptive and topographical about our contemporary dystopia, our “NorthEast Kingdom,” our weather, our times. In striking poems of political intensity and social accounting, Daniel Bouchard names the world we are in with rage, dissent, mourning, a satiric eye, and an ironic slant.

— Rachel Blau DuPlessis

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, and why he can’t help it: “I have the poet’s dual instinct to say/ on the one hand it doesn’t matter and/ the other to set everyone straight,” he concludes; “I must have more hands than that.” (June)
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Daniel Bouchard’s books include Spider Drop, The Filaments (Zasterle Press), and Diminutive Revolutions . His chapbook, Art and Nature was published by Ugly Duckling Press in 2014.

Sherry Brennan, poet and translator, lives in New York and works at New School University. Earlier chapbooks include Taken, again today and The Resemblances. She has published widely in journals such as Chain, How(ever), New American Writing and raddle moon. Recent essays can be found in African American Review and the online journal Jacket.