Poetry. "'Already the unlasting has started,' Emily Carr writes in her fragmented and achingly beautiful how-to (warning/guideline/almanac) for young wives and young poets. Attempting to salvage the 'de-articulate, mirror/ the lunatic bride,' Carr quickly makes us aware that her speaker's grip on reality is made of borrowed lace. The result is a series of '36 fits.' Installed by month, each perfectly spare poem talks back to the contemporary canon--Frank Bidart, Nick Flynn, Larry Levis, CD Wright, and about twenty-five others. Yet the strongest poem in the book, 'yolk (v.)' happens to be the only 'fit' not 'after' someone else. When we finally get Carr's unfiltered voice it is naked, long-lined and stunning. Never have I seen a book so much about influence and identity as Directions for Flying. The female speaker, the young wife, fights to carve out her own identity, struggling with love and domesticity, its blessings and pitfalls. Among the chorus of poetic voices, Emily Carr's rises above--supreme, utterly unique, and definitely lasting"--Sarah Messer.

Directions for Flying: 36 Fits: A Young Wife's Almanac: Right Side Lower Arms Raise Arms Bend Knees Repeat on Left

Literature & Fiction

CARR, Emily

Poetry

Furniture Press Books

Poetry. Winner of the 2010 Furniture Press Poetry Prize. "The fluctuating horizon of each page where poems dissolve into 'Explanatory Notes' suggests the contemporary poet's struggle with lines and lineages entangling the lyric in a tradition shaped primarily by its hostility to tradition. Ware illustrates the writer's task, alternately fruitful and frustrating, to accomplish the poem as discrete object while experiencing self as fluid and associational, with a promiscuous appetite for language stimulated and satisfied as much by Frankfurt School philosophy and schoolyard myth as by Aaron Sorkin's television scripts and Lacan's Disney. Ware's book questions the possibility of transgression in a culture made by uncertain boundaries"—Elizabeth Savage.

Homage to Homage to Homage to Creeley

Ware, Joshua

Poetry. "Quirky, electric poems, spare and challenging."&mdash;Peter Matthiessen "WABAC MACHINE begins innocently enough with the thought that a cat has no real name and proceeds through inexorable dream/dervish/fairy tale logic to a place (the wild?) where nouns dissolve. This is a world of radical flux where self is barely even a construction. Let's call it post-human. There is nothing academic about it. Things loom up and are always something else. Here it makes perfect sense for one 'me' to say, 'I sell temporary kitties in the form of reconstituted sponges.'"&mdash;Rae Armantrout "Martine Bellen invokes a new Muse, a new daughter of Mnemosyne, in WABAC MACHINE. In these poems, Time itself is the traveler-visiting epic, visiting nightmare, mischief and the Land of Heart's Desire. To Bellen, Time is a creature alive for an instant, and the instant reaches very far indeed, in every direction, even so far as the laughter of the gods."&mdash;Donald Revell "Martine Bellen's psychological and linguistic adventures in poetry are unlike anyone else's. Celebrating the instabilities of our experience, her poems maneuver kaleidoscopically between ordinary life and myth or fairy tale, vital human concerns such as identity and dreamlike atmospheres where nothing stays as it appears for long. Her 'host of unlikely divinities' display a reality that is never ordinary, always evocative."&mdash;Charles North

WABAC Machine

Bellen, Martine

GRAMMAR is a marvelous investigation of the relational quality of words, the ways we inhabit them and they us. What emerges in these poems is a celebration of the unruly and insubordinate realm of the human. We live among the pauses of these 'known unknowns,' anchored in the physical yet mysterious to the core.—Elizabeth Willis"In her eloquent evocation of grammar, Elizabeth Savage tells us that 'The elements won't recognize / person, place, or thing...only movements of the same.' And so the very structure of communication proves pliable, responsive, overflowing with both history and heart. At the beginning of this gorgeous book, Savage warns us that 'there is no "I" in grammar,' but the feat of her writing is to show us that 'where there is urgency / there will be utterance.' Language stands at the ready, our 'provocative partner' in whose vehicle 'I may step / imperatively / into you.' Amid the false starts and scattered belief that pulse at the core of our relation to words, GRAMMAR deploys considerable sass and jazz while also opening to a vulnerability that displaces function with a more compassing dynamic. Here, language sweeps us up, until we 'swing from force / to formlessness' in radiant attention."—Elizabeth Robinson

Grammar

SAVAGE,ELIZABETH

Poetry. "In THE RE-ECHOES, Magnus weaves a multilayered call-and-response that slingshots from reproduction to history to evolution to etymology. What emerges is a hymn to all imperfect repetitions, a contrapunctus in honor of the 'generative combinatorial' that makes us at once very like each other, and totally unique. As in 'a game of telephone,' the point is not to clone, but to decay, fracture, to make the message 're-known, re-owned.' Strange loops abound, allusive and improbable, abundant and anomalous. As it 'avers the converse / conversation,' Magnus's fractal play of sound and sense delights, gives pause, and delights again."—Maureen Thorson

The Re-echoes

Magnus, Magus

Poetry. "Deborah Poe's 19th century heroine Hélène finds herself in the elaborate trap of a 'factory-convent,' manufacturing silk in western France&mdash;and her only release is the fantasy of producing it, instead, in China. Poe handles the implications and associations of these very different worlds with wrenching clarity. But finally, it is language&mdash;'We all our song within which voice finds its own escape'&mdash;that offers the window through which Hélène, and we, effect that escape. Poe's handling of language throughout the book is nothing less than liberating, and yet it's also arresting&mdash;it's often, in short, simply breathtaking, while her acrobatically precise and dynamic balance between research and attention allows the reader to be simultaneously transported beyond and riveted to the present. A major accomplishment, and a haunting one."&mdash;Cole Swensen "In this remarkable lineated novella, Deborah Poe's concentrated images accrete & transform: 'orange-edged' becomes 'gold,' silk & lives are bartered, nuns see yet do not say. Poe's brilliantly rhythmic prose lines both interrogate & untangle fixed notions of genre & narration, spinning conversation between white spaces while experimenting with utterance & its antecedent silences; 'I could think of no conversation to start' becomes 'I can feel your loom all the way over here/a chest silent, full of light.' In parts old-fashioned, sepia, handwritten, in parts postmodern patchwork lyric, the artist behind this work is generously capable of holding the paradox of distance & disappearance in proximity, inviting us to consider ceasing 'the mind's clattering' via an astonishingly moving feminist lullaby to times & places past."&mdash;Sandra Doller

Helene

Poe, Deborah

Poetry. LGBT Studies. "At once reckless, eccentric and graceful, j/j hastain's newest collection creates a poetics of overflow that interrogates the very nature of form, 'filling the filigree/with embodied/flicker/all of the parts of our flesh-compass.' In myrhh to re all myth, the poet innovates a fluidity that nurtures form 'as gap to invert/while we so ravenously/invent.' Rather than the brittle stasis of conventional poetry, this supple work rises to the level of jubilant defiance. Attending to our 'human askew' in a manner that is both empathic and challenging, hastain enacts dynamic swerves: this book generates an eros and intimacy that have social, spiritual and 'a truly galactic activism.'"—Elizabeth Robinson"'This is a romance of fractals,' an invigorating linguistic panoply which refuses to be any one thing. myrhh to re all myth gives us a vivid transdifferentiated poethic state—a sonic inquiry—thus feral post-gendered embodiment of 'the infinitely ferric dress.' Multiple, layered, disarming and hauntingly worthwhile, hastain spins a fine vocalic lyric gossamer about us, a future ethos and new grammatical treatise of fracture, rediscovery, and retelling, a myrhh re(garding) all myth."—Susana Gardner"MYRRH TO RE ALL MYTH is a vast consortium of direct transmissions from the brain stem, the limbic system, the neocortex and the ecosystem—these transmissions are then transduced by intensive language decoding the flows. hastain presents a sensual wardrobe of aternal, untimely and actual meanings that give a perlocutionary effect of incredible wonder. I'm entranced by this book."—Brenda Iijima

myrrh to re all myth

hastain, j/j

Poetry. LGBT Studies. "Inside every intimate relationship, Alyse Knorr argues, lies a land of the imagination known only to those in relation. Her beautiful and wise ANNOTATED GLASS follows its protagonist, Alice, into and out of lands invented in childhood and adolescence, between family members and lovers, uncovering in each situation and between each of its characters 'a network of nerves speaking each to each.' The beauty of Knorr's writing lives in these electric connections, the way Alice's desire for her lover Jenny runs&mdash;a 'current on my tongue like the inside / of a star.' But the wisdom of ANNOTATED GLASS lies in its ability to describe the loss not only of family and lovers but also the imaginative landscapes that remain behind when they do. Knorr captures each elegiac departure with images of startling clarity and ambient texture: 'yellow tractors mowing / fields of sunflowers whose faces / have turned black.' This is a first book of rare real power and insight."&mdash;Brian Teare "Alyse Knorr's debut collection, ANNOTATED GLASS, takes us on an adventure, a foray into the bewilderland of love and grief. But ANNOTATED GLASS is not a gloss on Through the Looking Glass and Knorr's Alice is no buttoned-up and pinafored Victorian child. Illumined everywhere with intelligence, emotional complexity, and deep compassion for its characters, this masterfully interwoven sequence unfurls. Composed of brief graceful lyrics&mdash;some erotic, some funny, some astonished by happiness and good fortune, some interfused with wistful sadness&mdash;a narrative develops. Knorr creates compelling and complex characters startled to find what they thought was ordinary life suddenly turned inside-out and backwards."&mdash;Jennifer Atkinson

Annotated Glass

Knorr, Alyse

History & Criticism

Poetry. "Ryan Eckes' VALU-PLUS continues his incisive, wry, sincere, &amp; gorgeous examination of the city- landscape. In Eckes' work, the city—Philadelphia, specifically—cannot be contained, but is well lived in &amp; observed &amp; explored. There is 'a box to be gutted / between dollar tree and footlocker' &amp; 'a worry of rowhomes the body / aches out of.' Place in Eckes' poems can shift its shape between the gutted box &amp; the infinitely expansive—'a box / spraypainted / on the wall / in red / for stickball.' A box of air—it both is &amp; is not there. &amp; the city is something we are in &amp; we carry with us in these wonderful poems. Their stubborn, brilliant sound will return to you as you walk down the street. VALU-PLUS is an archive, a love-letter, a political sharp edge, a report from the adjunct-field, a wondering over 'how we / live this country' &amp; 'how to live in a fucked / world.'"—Pattie McCarthy

Valu-Plus

Eckes, Ryan

Poetry. "DAUGHTERS OF YOUR CENTURY begins with the 'aftermath of feeling' and proceeds to recover, and uncover, an acute sense of human beingness. Dan's immediate world of family, friends and forebears becomes the reader's world as well; and opens a space wherein language can be discovered rediscovering itself&mdash;'to wake / to shape a fuzz to form / to make a place.' These poems are an antidote to desensitization. They relentlessly give 'permission to care.'"&mdash;Joseph Massey "An elegy addressed to the living, to the only-just-begun, DAUGHTERS OF YOUR CENTURY sings the small lament of everyday life, sends the love poems of a damaged world. The drone, the plastic gyre, gender and all its divisions&mdash;Dan Thomas-Glass refuses to look away, but neither does he give up: 'Daughter your century will fight too, / though the owners will own the water.' These are dad poems, with daughters and care work at their center, minus any masculine heroics about doing that work. We poems. For all of us."&mdash;Stephanie Young "DAUGHTERS OF YOUR CENTURY is devastating in the best possible way. passionate. sad. hopeful. it stands for something. it makes you want to stand for something. it is intimate and yet shoulders a universality that is so much bigger than all of us. Dan Thomas-Glass has created something beautiful, brutal, epic. a Frank O'Hara for this generation, he lives in and with the knowledge of time passing, seeking and giving importance to the dailyness of things, the dailyness of living. there is nothing more heartbreaking or resonant. 'I want big meanings too my friends.' yes. yes, i do.&mdash;erica lewis

Daughters of Your Century

Thomas-Glass, Dan

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