Recommended Reading for the Summer, 2006

Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. Edited by Victoria Chang. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2004. For a terrific review/essay about this anthology and two others, by Timothy Yu: see Galatea Resurrects, no. 2. http://galatearesurrection2.blogspot.com/2006/05/asian-american-poetry-next-generation.html

Joshua Marie Wilkinson. Lug your careless body out of the careful dusk: a poem in fragments. University of Iowa Press, 2006. 7. Serial Poems caught in a brilliant light, exposed and mysterious. One with the title: "The Unofficial Handbook of Librarian Tricks." Get out!

Carl Phillips. Riding Westward. New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006. Precision knives, carving out reports on the status of love. Refined treatments by way of bird, by way of wing, by way of tree, by way of mystery and fire, as in refiner’s fire. The mind moving elsewhere, looking for the spiritual body in the physical body. "No one gets hurt."

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge. I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2006. Necessary. How great a thing.

Jesse Seldess. Who Opens. Kenning Editions, 2006.

Dan Featherston. United States. Factory School, 2005.

Dan Featherston. Into the Earth. Philadelphia, Quarry Press, 2006.

Donald Hall. White Apples and the Taste of Stone. Selected Poems 1946-2006.

Arielle Greenberg. My Kafka Century. Tuscaloosa, Action Books, 2005.
Possible alternative titles: My date with Henry James, my night with Alain Delon. Absolutely a zinger of a book: "Call me over you bad blue fairy. Terror. Mother."

Gathering Ground, a reader celebrating Cave Canem's first decade. Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady, editors. Camille T. Dungy, assistant editor. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2006. A very nice book. A true boquet. A croquet Game? But, but, WHERE IS GAR ELLIOT PATTERSON.

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Every Goodbye Aint' Gone. An Anthology of innovative poetry by African Americans. Edited by Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey. Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 2006.
A full, big hearted anthology, with an excellent introduction charting the rise of experimental poetry in the back community, emphasizing the role of anthologies. It is great to have A long and littler known piece by Melvin Tolson, and to have work by the usually and unjustly ignored Tom Weatherly, Stephen Jonas and Cecil Taylor. The real find for me was Percy Johnston. Of course, remember, "innovative" is in the mind of the beholder. 38 poets, primarily flourishing in the sixties and seventies. Another volume will include more contemporary poets, or at least younger ones. We look forward to seeing that. One caveat: Contributors notes do not a bibliography make.

Cloud View Poets, an anthology: Master Classes with David St. John. Edited by Morley Clark, et al. Sausalito, Arctos Press, 2005.What? Surely this book is an example of a book which shouldn’t have been published, relying I suppose on the idea that if all these people studied with David St. John they must have something beside that in common? Not even a step above a vanity publication.

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Bay Poetics, edited by Stephanie Young. Cambridge, Faux Press, 2006.

How about a subtitle? At least this anthology has some interesting poets, old and young in it. It is, of course an example of a political anthology in that all these poets hang out in a variety of Bay area venues, or publish in the same periodicals or by the same presses, etc. Much saner than studying with one poet.

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Stacy Doris. Cheerleader’s Guide to the World: Council Book. New York, Roof Books, 2006.

“Imagine Reese Witherspoon with the rebels in Chiapas, recounting the history of civilization & its collapse as transmitted by flying Tibetan monks. Alternately, imagine the love child of William Burroughs & John Berryman, but with pom-poms & a little literalism on the shotgun formation. Give me an A! This is a great book.” ---------Ron Silliman.