Gilgamesh at the Bellagio opens memorably as Karl Elder confronts the reader with his always-astonishing prosodic acrobatics, showcased this time in 26 deeply intelligent decasyllabic abecedarians. It ends with more of the same (but backwards!) in "Z Ain't Just for Zabacedarium." Glimmering in between is the title poem, which recreates, with sardonic humor and a perfect ear for the vernacular, aspects of society's profound collective melancholia. A tour de force by a superlative American poet. --Marilyn L. Taylor, Contributing Editor of The Writer. These intellectual poems owe a debt to the tradition of cerebral poets: Shakespeare, Donne and the metaphysicals, Modernists like Eliot, Pound, and Stevens, and John Berryman's Dream Songs, although they also reference pop culture figures. Difficult at times, Elder's poems merit careful attention, both for their fresh approach to form, as well as for their range of subject matter and their wit, and they reward close, repeated readings. --Wendy Vardaman in Free Verse. [Karl Elder] is, for my money, writing some of the most innovative and resonant verse out there. And, man, he is out there. Not that there¿s anything wrong with that. I mean that while he seems to have his literary ancestors like the rest of us (Stevens for his lushness, Donne for his wit, Berryman for his change-up syntax pitch), he seems to come at the world from an angle uniquely his own. --Beth Ann Fennelly in Black Warrior Review. In this book you'll find a gambling/gamboling Gilgamesh framed by sassy romps through the alphabet. Whether Elder is coming or going, h'¿s always having fun and so, reader, will you. --Lola Haskins, author of Desire Lines. Karl Elder is a clever man and poet. . . . inventive . . . imaginative and energetic . . . . Why not enjoy a bit of this welcome relief from our extended bitter recitations? Shakespeare occasionally gave us a fun break even in his tragedies." --Paul Zimmer in Georgia Review

Gilgamesh at the Bellagio

Elder, Karl

Literature & Fiction

National Poetry Review Press

"'I can't believe I live anywhere,' the poet says in this remarkably dark, quirky, sad and surprising collection of poems. But he does-in Expatriatetown and Elegytown, in Endtown and Doubttown, on and on in his solitary travels. Bryan Penberthy's brilliant guiding metaphor goes past conceit to the multiple worlds within us, going past homage and question and complaint, back to a source radiant and genuine. A toast to this fine first book!" -Marianne Boruch "If there were one American poet that the work of Bryan Penberthy most esembles, it might be the late Richard Hugo; but Penberthy is a far better poet than Dick was, with a wild sense of humor and none of the oppressive self-involvement that all too often freighted Hugo's poetry. The mind behind these poems is obviously brilliant, and the personality engaging. Friends, meet Bryan Penberthy." -Jonathan Holden "These poems are a work of multiple, ongoing scenarios, which beguile the reader each time one starts up again: 'This could be the best place you've known.' These approaches to viewing the world-Quiettown, Pooltown, Sleeptown, and so on-seem actually human rather than simply mechanically humanistic-that is, we live through them, and that sometimes is all we can do. Possibility exists, but truth follows a pattern just beyond one's control. Free will exists, not that it ends up doing us all that much good. So we tell our stories, these stories, and get on with it: 'We're only as real/as the landscape that shifts around us.'" -Alberto Ríos, 2007 T. S. Eliot Prize judge "Bryan Penberthy's Lucktown is smart in its unflinching: 'the dead / can't be accurately counted, their ends are miserable and useless,' and smart too in its hope for art. . . . And smart yet again in its hopeless hope for love triumphing over the persistent failure of love. . . . Lucktown believes in luck simply because sometimes your number has to come up on the roule??e wheel or people would stop gambling. Lucktown itself, though, is a winner." -Andrew Hudgins "Reading Bryan Penberthy's Lucktown is like looking through the facets of a well-cut prism to see a sometimes blurred, but rainbow-edged world come into sharp focus. He inhabits the endless towns of his imagination, which become surreal topoi for different psychic states. The poems' titles are themselves a prose poem: lucktown, tigertown, pooltown, expatriatetown, oceantown, sleeptown, quiettown, doubttown, crazytown, smoketown, goodbyetown. The mood is indigo. All the world's randomness, melancholias, self-delusions, hopes, yearnings, woundings, desires are given voice through a book of great formal rigor and variety. Yes, Penberthy is mining Richard Hugo's boom-and-bust silver towns, but his small towns have the inconsolable dolor of his own Midwest. As Penberthy says, 'there's been some minor / talk of sending out a party // to find out what makes the world burn. / There's been this kind of talk before.' Yes, but this talk, though minor-keyed, is not minor. These poems do tell us what makes the world burn." -Donald Platt

Lucktown

Penberthy, Bryan

Poetry

<p>Eros and wit make for an irresistible pair, true enough. Invest their coupling with a cast of classical figures, a compelling lyric music, and a lush sense of the laden line, and, well, you have a party worth attending. What is most alluring here remains the book's complex of delicious tensions-sensuality paired with spiritual longing, a keen, critical eye attended by deep compassion, and a very much spoken delivery attaining sculptural precision. - Scott Cairns If The Kissing Party could carry its own flag, it would read, "that obscenity the heart," the perfect tagline for Sarah Barber's smart and sexy collection. This book is classical and crude, calculated and crafty, thoroughly seductive and not a little naughty. But most memorable for me are the lyrically transcendent moments in poems such as "Late Birds" and in lines such as "I who make longing a professional career." Barber's career looks to be a promising one indeed.- Kathy Fagan Fiercely intelligent and sexy, The Kissing Party reads like a fabular closet drama, whose flood subjects - desire and the soul's sojourn - are played out by dramatis personae ranging widely and provocatively from Apollo and other classical figures from myth and art, Rothko, various holy men and women, porn stars, Lord Byron, and anonymous protagonists from an erotic novel of the Abruzzi, to the daring, insomniacal guises of the narrator herself. The poems cavort boldly with patent rhetorical and romantic moves - the male gaze, traditional poetic form, the pathetic fallacy, the onus of the human heart, vanitas, and de Man's notion of autobiography as defacement. Like Dickinson, Barber wields her words like blades; hers is an original sensibility, "untidily / golden and dangerously sharp." - Lisa Russ Spaar</p>

The Kissing Party

Barber, Professor Sarah

Fort Gorgeous

Vogel, Angela

<p>How is it that Betsy Wheeler makes me feel both accompanied by and accompaniment to her seductive, disarming, and lushly inventive poems? "Everything is what we need," she writes in Loud Dreaming in a Quiet Room. And in this dream, everything is what we get. Such intensity, richness, humor, and unabashed innocence in these poems. I love their lyricism, their playfulness with the poetic conventions of you and I, and the joy they take in making music. An auspicious and captivating debut! -Kathy Fagan In many of the poems of this confident and moving first collection, the speaker is either falling asleep or waking. This is because she deeply desires and hopes for change: a new life, full of love, compassion, imagination, and awareness. "Something this good, this beyond/ the realm of possibility/ should be called gleaming." These poems, through their gorgeous, often strange, yet always accessible language, bring us into the necessary struggle - familiar, worrisome, ludicrous, sublime, essential - to wake to live in a more authentic, imaginative, freer realm. -Matthew Zapruder Rare synthetic intelligence, sympathetic imagination, emotional equilibrium, versatility and flexibility, a book conditioned to be open, welcoming, kind and true, a collection carefully shaped, carefully said. These poems say poetry-you don't want to spare poetry, you want to keep a place prepared for it, to entice it to come along, anytime. Loud Dreaming in a Quiet Room. Loud Dreaming in a Quiet Room. Astonishing. -Dara Wier Betsy Wheeler completed her MFA in poetry at The Ohio State University. From 2005-2007, she held the Stadler Fellowship at Bucknell University. She is Managing Director for the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at U-Mass, Amherst and is editor of Pilot Books-a publisher of limited edition poetry chapbooks. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.</p>

Loud Dreaming in a Quiet Room

Wheeler, Betsy

The Wanted, Michael Tyrell's sharp-eyed, intellectually inventive, playful, and darkly humorous first book, is filled with so many wonderful and surprising ways of looking at familiar things that it answers Stevens' dilemma about which to prefer-"The beauty of inflections/ Or the beauty of innuendoes"-by preferring them both. Tyrell expresses this preference by way of a patient and scrupulous self-scrutiny, the kind he observes in Egon Schiele's representation of trees in which the painter "looked at himself, tore out the human, cleaved/ it into branches." So, too, Tyrell looks at himself and cleaves the essential human matter of his perceptions onto the provocative and often sinuous lines of his verse. --Michael Collier * * *  Like the haunted, disconnected heads on a wanted poster, Michael Tyrell's daring and fiercely intelligent poems signify nothing less than the mystery of existence, the relationship between how one is perceived to what one really is, if such a thing were possible to express. To read these remarkable poems is to enter the shadow world of the wanted, where every surface is vulnerable to a violence, real or implied, that will crack it open to reveal a secret code. A book of masks where the disguised often forgets it wears the mask and the mask forgets it is not the face, The Wanted invites us to "enter the wet bladed edges/ which break us again into separate beings, / pour salt into wherever we bleed." Enter with caution and be prepared to lose yourself.--Henry Israeli* * * In Michael Tyrell's The Wanted, the images, techniques, and preoccupations of film noir permeate many of the poems. There are references to crime scenes, acts of real and imagined violence, missing children, lie detectors, forgeries, guns, exit wounds, and much more. In "The Supporting Character," the poet writes, "The narration's unreliable./...I'm a subplot about to unfold." All of this for good reason since Tyrell's subject is essentially the unfathomability of identity and selfhood-a mystery to be slowly puzzled at, unraveled, exposed. Ultimately, the poet's evasions are the evasions and uncertainties we experience in our everyday lives, both with ourselves and with other people. The Wanted is a strange, disquieting book that serious readers will keep returning to as they plumb the many levels of these resonant, mysterious poems. --Elizabeth Spires* * *   Michael Tyrell resides in Brooklyn, where he was born. His writing has appeared in Agni, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, and many other magazines. With Julia Spicher Kasdorf, he edited the anthology Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (NYU Press, 2007). He teaches at New York University.

The Wanted

Tyrell, Michael

Meg Johnson's collection, Inappropriate Sleepover, had me at page one. Her quirky and darkly humorous poems are as refreshing as they are clever, as disarmingly entertaining as they are provocative. Meg Johnson is a stunning addition to the American poetry scene. -Nin Andrews Half siren song, half battle cry, Meg Johnson's Inappropriate Sleepover is a debut collection that coaxes us out of our tightlyzipped sleeping bags and keeps us up until dawn with poems that resonate, beguile, and delight. Equally whimsical and poignant, Johnson's voice introduces us to a new sort of poetry heroine: one who is undaunted by external forces that oppose her, and driven to excavate the most subtle nuances of human connection. These are poems to keep for yourself, and to share with your very best friends. -Mary Biddinger In these poems, Meg Johnson dances on the narrow boundary dividing self-confidence from self-delusion. Always unsettled, her restlessness born from her awareness that the self is too big to fit, even when broken into parts, into the many and ever-proliferating boxes in which a self is expected to find its many homes, her speakers both celebrate and lament the quotidian by which they are enraptured: "If I was a tree I'd / want to be a pine because of the needles. People / would always be finding a piece of me." And the celebrating, and the lamenting, are themselves both enrapturing. -Shane McCrae Meg Johnson was born and raised in Ames, Iowa, and has since lived and worked in various cities. Her poems have appeared in Hobart, The Puritan, San Pedro River Review, Sugar House Review, Wicked Alice, and others. Meg started dancing at a young age and worked professionally in the performing arts for many years. She is currently the editor of Dressing Room Poetry Journal and an M.F.A. candidate in creative writing. Visit her at www.megjohnson.org.

Inappropriate Sleepover

Johnson, Meg

Hinge is a book fixated on contingency and what it might mean to live in it. These meditative lyrics are radically, at times painfully aware that anything could happen .... This awareness walks hand in hand with Wolahan's almost preternatural sensitivity to cause and effect, the syntax of the physical and the interplay of the parts that make up any given whole. More than any younger poet I can think of, Wolahan is attuned to the engineering of the world she walks through as well as to the musical possibilities it suggests ....Hinge is a startlingly mature, refined debut. - Timothy Donnelly  Presiding over Hinge is a fierce and forwandering intelligence, one that preserves the traces of its coming to consciousness of all that surrounds it and that it surrounds. These poems know that something is exchanged for apprehension, the way a wave removes part of what it reveals of the beach that understands it.... - Jane Gregory  Emily Wolahan accounts for the delicate hinges between pronouns, and through this poet's attentive gaze, we see the seams between the known and unknown, the there, not yet there .... By simultaneously seeing and asking what is seen, Wolahan performs the stakes in the hinges .... - Michelle Taransky  Emily Wolahan has lived in Britain, Hong Kong, Japan, Saudi Arabia, France, Italy, and America. She received an MA in Literature from University of Houston and an MFA in Writing from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in journals such as Gulf Coast, Boston Review, Omniverse, DIAGRAM, and Drunken Boat. She is also co-founder and co-editor of JERRY Magazine. She now lives with her husband and two children in San Francisco, where she teaches writing.

Hinge

Wolahan, Emily

Little Myths

Platow, Beth Woodcome

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