Poetry. Formally innovative and playful, drawing on personal experience and research, Michelle Noteboom's first collection of poems weaves together obsessions with skin and body, desire and violence, science and sensuality. While remaining firmly rooted in a real sense of physicality, EDGING catapults us into a futuristic outpost "on the outskirts of something," where identity blurs and our bodies become "a new kind of language." "We're all insiders when it comes to the skin. Michelle Noteboom's EDGING wants to turn that inside out. This is skin as the material of ever-changing identity. The vibrations, pressure points, scrubbing and shedding--various, curious, tragic, sensual, and exact. William Burroughs thought language was a virus; reading Noteboom one suspects it may be a masseuse.."--Rod Smith. "In this deeply moving first collection, Michelle Noteboom takes a rigorous, relentless, and compassionate look at the body in its most vulnerable moments. Focusing on skin--as a wave in which the body breaks against the world, as a screen on which our most intimate communications are written--she probes human possibility, revealing how it can betray humanity, but also, how, ultimately, it returns to it"--Cole Swensen.

Edging

Literature & Fiction

Noteboom, Michelle

Poetry

Cracked Slab Books

Poetry. This anthology brings together a sampling of some of the best poets working in Chicago and the surrounding region. From all corners of the city, these poets are crafting a voice for Chicago literature in the new century. "When Carl Sandburg asked in his Chicago Poems, close to a hundred years ago, for 'a voice to speak to me in the day end, / A hand to touch me in the dark room / Breaking the long loneliness,' little did he know his city would be so fully and lovingly answered and so honored. Chicago is once again transformed by poetry. Here in these myriad acts of imagination, the poets of THE CITY VISIBLE give to it again, in Shakespeare's terms, 'a local habitation and a name'"--Peter Gizzi.

The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for The New Century

Poetry. "There's much to be learned here. At this long moment--this book--in Garin Cycholl's continuing project the prairie's a verb ('light cracked and/ prairied'), the landscape of the Midwest 'a haggard trophy'; these pages tangle exquisitely with the varieties of distance and from South-of-70 to the city of the big shoulders and beyond, the work teases belief out of chrome, tours the nature of vipers, and traces (and burns) the blue in green. Rafetown Georgics is a confidence of practical matters (rural and otherwise), a jukebox of voices telling wonders, an astonishing book"--C. S. Giscombe.

Rafetown Georgics

Cycholl, Garin

Poetry. MAP OF THE HYDROGEN WORLD, Steve Halle's first collection of poems, shuns the divide between post-avant and Official Verse Culture poetics by embracing traditional forms while simultaneously developing new ways of working through poetry. From traditional lyric and narrative poems to formal experiments, Halle finds his own way through history, art, politics, faith and self. "Ginsbergian incantation, high modernist allusion, post-avant rhizome and the documentary collage--these are the weapons in Steve Halle's arsenal. Joyce, Eliot, Emerson, Whitman and Keats shoot through the static of text-messaging, global positioning systems, surveillance culture, and an urgent sense of the world's victims. Halle carries a humanistic heritage into an inhuman world. "--Robert Archambeau.

Map of the Hydrogen World

Halle, Steve

Poetry. "The poetry of MORPHS features a committed conversation this reader experiences as occurring in layers, pricks, grace notes, simulated dance steps, and thick sliding scales. The authors' pleasure in inventing ways to communicate a deux across geographic distance is always in evidence. While formally inventive, the interpersonal world of these poems is rich in content and serious play"--Carla Harryman. "MORPHS is a poetics of 'Beginner's Mind'"--Christian Peet.

Morphs

Pallant, Cheryl

Jenkins, Grant

Poetry. "What would you get if you crossed French postmodern theory with an Appalachian Southern stock(car)? Tim Earley and this book, a book of poetry as dense as kudzu, the prolific half-mad fully strange quite funny alphabetic riffing alive in & enlivening a truly New South. A rich crazy book propelled equally by the engines of love and anger, a restless intelligence honking & screaming & improvising a new hymn of place, rich in the nutrients of an omnivorous vocabulary, pointing the way to stagger, dance, and run through 'another embittered paradise,' asking 'is there a self in the belly of the beast?'"--Hank Lazer.

The Spooking of Mavens

Earley, Tim

Course of Action

Kervinen, Jukka-Pekka

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

Books by Cracked Slab Books