Poetry. RUB OUT is a trilogy of experimental verse novels: "Rub Out," a meditation on Whitey Bulger and other Boston mobsters, Concord transcendentalists and the disappearance of a young woman; "Breezy Point," a lament set in New York City's seaside community of that name; and "Tell On You," a prose poem sequence focusing on boxing, Las Vegas comics and a corpse that washes ashore in Brooklyn.

Rub Out

Literature & Fiction

Barrett, Ed

Contemporary

Pressed Wafer

Poetry. "These poems occur between a wondering mind and the world, in the 'photic sneeze reflex' of spring blossoms, the flash of a cell-phone camera, the invisible edge of a concrete saw, and the sudden turbulence of a summer afternoon. These are moments of lyric intensity, sharply observed and finely wrought, delicate structures of wonder and art. Of course, wonder does not preclude irony. Our joys get caught in circuits of self-consciousness. Our freedoms prove fleeting and sometimes desperate, as when a jet-ski driver cuts his engine to coast through 'self-made / rain.' This is modern life, 'everything aiming // at everything / and just missing...' One poem asks, 'is this praise, then?' Praise and lament, both—twin strands of the mind's consent. Such are the roots of this compassionate poetry."—Devin Johnston

Consent

Klug, Nate

Poetry

Fiction. Two raucous, funny and piercing stories—"Men in Love" and "America Strikes Back"—about the "wars" we live with—you've got a front row seat.

Waiting for the Wars to End

Quinn, Jim

Poetry. African American Studies. "In SURFACE TO AIR, RESIDUALS OF BASQUIAT, Keith Jones approaches the unaccountable in small measures that draw us down to a whole other kind of immensity. There's lots of room and lots of company in these spacious concentrations; we can read and write in the midst and all over the edge of their dense, open tuning. Sonorous numbers, free market numerators, undercommon denominators, a ruptural totality of images recomposed as geography, another map of the world 'Segued into / Broken sorts.' Jones keeps making sure we know that in the relay between surface and air, ground and song, artists make radical and precise mathematics, deep and unruly history. Like Basquiat, Jones is right there with the ones who do more than we can ask."--Fred Moten

Surface to Air, Residuals of Basquiat

Jones, Keith

Poetry. Ed Barrett's KEVIN WHITE is a prose poem novel about four-term Boston mayor Kevin White, poet John Wieners, fugitive mobster and FBI informant Whitey Bulger, his brother and former president of the Massachusetts State Senate Billy, Whitey's girlfriend and mob hit victim Deborah Hussey, Virgil, Nomar Garciaparra, Catherine of Siena, Friedrich Hölderlin, Cardinal Law, Fanny Howe, a bank robber and the Virgin Mary. In its improbable chorale of assembled dramatis personae, this work is the story of making symphony out of cacophony, making relationships out of contingency, profaning the sacred, and sanctifying the mundane.

Kevin White

Nonfiction. Politics. Literary Criticism. WHAT ARE INTELLECTUALS GOOD FOR? appraises a large gallery of twentieth-century intellectuals, including Randolph Bourne, Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, Isaiah Berlin, William F. Buckley Jr., Allan Bloom, Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, Christopher Lasch, Edward Said, Ellen Willis, and Christopher Hitchens. It also includes two essays on intellectuals and politics and concludes with one on moral consequences of our species cyber-evolution. George Scialabba, a columnist for the Boston Globe and contributor to the Boston Review, Dissent, the American Prospect, and the Nation, is admired by a circle of discerning readers. WHAT ARE INTELLECTUALS GOOD FOR?, his second essay collection, brings his voice to a larger audience. Scott McLemee, the Intellectual Affairs columnist of InsideHigherEd, has contributed a foreword.

What Are Intellectuals Good For?

Scialabba, George

History & Criticism

Poetry. SECRET DONUT is Aaron Tieger's first full-length collection.

Secret Donut

Tieger, Aaron

Poetry. "Like two of my favorite poets who were born in Boston, John Weiners and Paul Hannigan, Margo Lockwood is Catholic, mystical, modest, brilliant, biting and agnostic. Sometimes she is like Li Po, sometimes like The Silent Traveller, the Chinese historian who wrote turn of the century books on American cities, but remained invisible, and sometimes she writes with the spirit of one who has dragged a broom and shaken a wooden spoon. She has the racing brain of genius common to the Irish people and seems to know everything. She certainly knows her books. The "dark door" in this volume could be the door into the one book that she will never read. But there it stands, central to her assessment of life's little atonements and ironic slights. I count her among one of the great Boston poets. She captures the strange and unnamable quality of this wayside city"--Fanny Howe.

More Than I Want To

Lockwood, Margo

Fiction. LGBT Studies. In a small midwestern college town everyone seems to be making art--writing poems, composing sound collages, welding auto parts, performing Shakespeare with computer graphics, and even constructing an imaginary island in an attic. There's some consolation, after hopeless romance and information overload, in finding beauty in your own corner of the vast world.

Consolation

Strong, Jonathan

Literary Nonfiction. Art. Illustrated by 40 color plates. Essay by William Corbett. ALBERT YORK is the first monograph on the little known but intensely admired American painter who died in 2009 at eighty-one. York showed at Manhattan's Davis &amp; Langdale Gallery beginning in 1963 and throughout his career. His shows had good reviews; his work sold but word of his special quality has just begun to spread into the wider world. His subjects are as ordinary--cows, trees in a meadow, flowers bunched in a tomato can--as his forms and paint handling powerful. William Corbett has followed York's work for thirty-five years. He has published a book on Philip Guston, edited the letters of James Schuyler, and is a poet.

Albert York

Arts & Photography

Corbett, William

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