Poetry. "Matthew Lippman's poems know how to love as only a heart knows how to love. Swelling with rage, candor, humor, and empathy, his lyrics embrace vulnerability and grit that navigate the mire that the world lays before us each day. Their music makes singular reconciliations where anxiety and angst are lent a tough and tender grace."—Michael Morse "Reading a Matthew Lippman poem is like encountering an unstoppable force—or forces. One moment you're walking down Broadway next to an old friend who's talking a mile a minute—he's on a tear, he's manic but eminently likable, and his monologue is heating up to the point of combustion. Another moment you're listening to a voiceover spoken by a hardboiled and vaguely hypnagogic private eye. And yet another moment you're at the Tamarack Lodge in a Catskills of long ago listening to a crazed Borscht Belt comedian. And finally you're listening to a mystic intoning prophecies from deep in the reaches of a dream. I love poetry that takes me through such a range of voices, guises, poses, intensities, and diapasons, yet also manages to make me feel that I am in the presence of a truly human and truly real and singular personality. These poems were written by a man who takes much pleasure in moving through this mysterious world in language and in a body. He wants to share this pleasure with us—and that is generous, and as good a reason for writing poems as any I can think of."—Geoffrey Nutter "Matthew's poems wake us up with brutal honesty and humor. If you think poetry has lost touch with everyday life, this book will restore your faith and welcome you back."—Rob MacDonald

American Chew

Literature & Fiction

Lippman, Matthew

Poetry

Burnside Review Pr

Poetry. GOOD BEAST terrifies, its poems possess air-like clarity. They are vast and mostly invisible. Roberts turns away from narrative in search of the moment and the emotion, which he has the ability to view through a microscope or telescope, and then the audacity to show us a world gentle but with distance, close and intimate, and at times stuck in an emotional apogee.

Good Beast

Roberts, Andrew Michael

Poetry. "The poems in Paula Cisewski's THE THREATENED EVERYTHING take on a teetering, siren-infused world in which 'bullets rip through every modern poem, ' and the speaker, like the rest of us, is 'always and forever / on a stairway to a stairway to, ' stuck between floors and phrases like an infinitely skipping record. This book is both urban and animal. It inhabits the political realm and a panicked interiority, the elegiac ('This elegy / is for who one man / in a repeating // mirror of men might have been / before violence') and a newlywed bliss that borders on the hysterical ('happy / as a warehouse stuffed with // white umbrellas popped open!'). I am delighted by Cisewski's formal virtuosity and her feverish humor, and I'm scared to death--as one should be--by the accuracy of her apocalypse. 'We gravel-knee our motherland, ' she writes. 'We are patriots, Sisters and Brothers, and our country's flag is a gaping beak.' This book's arrival is imperative, urgent. It burns."--Diane Seuss

The Threatened Everything

Cisewski, Paula

Poetry. "The poems in Sara Miller's SPELLBOUND are deeply imagined, bizarre, and bent toward the light. Unafraid to dissect the animals of the night, the way the natural world beckons, the inner madness that makes us all obsessive creatures, this is a book that risks the confines of time and space to sing a song that feels ancient and endless."--Ada Limón

Spellbound

Miller, Sara

Poetry. "One way to introduce this posthumously released book by the beautiful enigma of Mark Baumer is to say something about how, as he lived, Mark was the writer most possessed of freedom--pure, uncompromised creative freedom--that I've probably ever read. By this I mean that the body of work he was able to produce in his heartbreakingly short time on our planet operated rigorously and overflowingly in a matter of vision unbound by convention, expectation, structure, theme, much less awards, credits, recognition; I mean how in everything he ever wrote, whether about vegetables or capitalism, office work or walking barefoot across America, from one word to another absolutely anything might happen, any inanimate entity might find a voice, through any word; to the extent that, from the outside, it seems the work of a child genius, where by child I mean the kind so unaffected by the arbitrary canonical rules that, like Barthelme or Kharms, it seems to describe a version of the world so innately absurd, so blissfully unbound, that many more restricted readers might receive it, one might say, only as might someone looking out through the security grid of our luxury panopticon at a far off and spectacular horizon slowly receding across the wide and darkened land, hearing an old friend's voice somewhere way out there in the receding gradient, saying it's okay, you will wake up soon, I am here."--Blake Butler

Meow

Baumer, Mark

Poetry. Taking its inspiration from the work of Russian Absurdist authors such as Alexander Vvedensky and Daniil Kharms, FUR NOT LIGHT interrogates how deep senselessness runs in a post-truth and truthiness world. Incorporating serial poems such as "Nothing of the Month Club" and "December 32nd," as well as the long ideogram-based work "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living," FUR NOT LIGHT makes manifest the way that, as one of the poems in the volume puts it, "there's a difference between turning around and turning back."

Fur Not Light

ALESSANDRELLI, JEFF

Poetry. "Kary Wayson entrusts her whole art to the ludic music of language, seeking its way, syllable by syllable, phrase by sprightly turn of phrase, through way stations of feeling. She is funny and devastated and electrifying at every turn: '...he held down my knot / with a finger in the center the / better to tie my bow--;' 'I've followed my thinking like a man out driving / --and just back there he missed the turn.' These poems make me laugh out loud and blink back sudden tears. Mostly, though, they leave me slack-jawed at their lexical, logical, and wildly various tonal grace. For anyone seeking to survive primal loss and keep singing, Kary Wayson shows the way."--Suzanne Buffam

The Slip

Wayson, Kary

Poetry. Szporluk has often been read and praised as a visionary surrealist, but her body of work, evinced by VIRGINALS, shows her also as a powerful dramatist, enacting scenes rooted in very real moments of tension and danger. These shocking stanzas lay bare their speakers' violent psyches, and take poet and reader to new, honest spaces cleared of niceties and decorum. In sequences of poems, Szporluk acknowledges and explores the dissonance of art and love, in narrow, unruly lines that are disarmingly direct, except the direction is towards a kind of madness. It's a relentless and overwhelming lyricism, persuasive and unforgettable.--Ed Skoog

Virginals

Szporluk, Larissa

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Burnside Review Pr publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Burnside Review Pr