Some Books from Early 2007

Rae Armantrout. Next Life. Wesleyan University Press, 2007.
Poems about exploring, caressingl, various "problems" of perception, cognition and vision. What it is like to think. You don't have to know physics to appreciate these poems, they're articulate for all of us.

Cole Swenson. The Glass Age. Alice James Books, 2007.
Erudite poetry. Three long poems, each in sections. Swenson makes elegant use of collage and gentle interrogation. She uses history and art, weaving Bonnard, among others, into her work and into our consciousness, with consummate skill and artfulness. A meditation on the nature of glass, the nature of windows, the nature of doors and always the nature of art and perception.

Roberto Tejada. Mirrors for Gold. Krupskaya, 2007.
A book of animation: of desire, sensuality and nakedness, autonomous bodies. The title refers to the sixteenth-century practice of conquistadors trading mirrors for gold, which serves as a palimpsest for the poems incision of modern love in Mexico City ("in the furnace of all insufficient flesh").

Graham Foust. Necessary Stranger. Flood Editions, 2007.
Imp dances. Love strangs. Life strings. Brawling words. Smooching words. As if somebody, at last had laughed and then married Ludwig Wittgenstein. A barn of fun. Some fun yarns.

Ann Waldman. Outrider. La Alameda Press, 2007.
A collection of poetic statements, interviews, poems, selections, memoirs and notes from the still wild woman of American poetry. Strikingly singular and particularly relevant as always

Peter Gizzi. The Outernationale. Wesleyan University Press, 2007.
Poems about everyday weather, poems about historical happening, poems about political standing, speaking, thinking. Gizzi calibrates minute changes in perception, thought, value in these electric poems. Telescopes, cameras, screendoors. He talks to trees (or at least to leaves). Imagine: "On What Became of Matthew Brady's Battle Photographs."