Poetry. "The percussive instinct that underlies AMONG OTHER THINGS provides the modal changes Zach Barocas makes on language, tapping them out in these lyrics whose rhythm is honesty. Find here life in the city, tender-hearted love, melancholic praise, a new poetic form (a hybrid elegy/epigram the poet calls a proposal) and, above all, syncopated with thoughtfulness and feeling, a lived, unassumingly offered sincerity."—Peter O'Leary "Zach Barocas is a hermit on the way to language, on the way to silence. He demonstrates, beautifully and powerfully, that the only words are the necessary ones. 'Trust:' he tells his readers, 'structure is thus / the same as spirit.' This laconic, utterly physical poetry makes me believe him."—Michael Heller "Among other things, poems are proposals: proposals that the world may be regarded differently. Zach Barocas does so again and again in this off-beat, pitch-perfect collection. These poem-proposals are among the things of the world, stand out among them, help us see them and ourselves more clearly and from a different, unwonted angle. As Barocas tells us, 'one / must at all times act // graciously with one's / realizations.' And so he has, with a sort of tact and understatement and plain good sense that is surprisingly rare in contemporary poetry. I urge you to accept his proposals."—Norman Finkelstein

Among Other Things: Poems & Proposals

Literature & Fiction

Barocas, Zach

Poetry

The Cultural Society

Poetry. "In THAT ABRUPT HERE Joel Bettridge proposes an entirely tender yet radical new imagination of the elegy: i.e., a blessing underway; a ceremony in wandering search of its proper and beloved lost occasion. In the deep-root meaning of the word, these poems are momentous."—Donald Revell

That Abrupt Here

Bettridge, Joel

Soft

Douglas Piccinnini

Poetry. Luminous epinoia, a Gnostic notion, stands for the primordial imagination from which the whole of creation came into being. Likewise, Peter O'Leary's poetry moves from a mythic unconscious to its manifestation in mutual dreaming: family, friends, literary forbearers, and political demons take their place in a Dantescan vision of order and strife. Yet the prevailing mode of this book is less narrative than devotional: O'Leary's rich diction, full of archaisms and neologisms, tessellates dreadcomb, lutrescence, fogroom, and beatitude, the whole of it forming a complex, cathedralic figure for desire.

Luminous Epinoia

O’Leary, Peter

Poetry. "What attracts one first to Chris Glomski's poetry is its intricacy, that sense of hidden meanings and cryptic revelation shimmering in 'its secret / curving rescissions / and negative spaces.' Soon afterwards, one comes to understand that he is not merely a sphinx wrapped in Chicago enigma, but that, if one attends to these poems, to the structures they embody, the guy has some actual wisdom to impart, the lean mean kind that probably felt just as good to Melville and Poe as it does today. I've often wondered why poets don't work more often with the compressed energies of steampunk. Certainly they work beautifully in this case, suffusing the book with a low, musical hum while whirling like modernist machines with all sorts of visual, sensory, and historical simultaneities. Plus he is funny. Plus he is amazing"—Kevin Killian.

The Nineteenth Century and Other Poems

Glomski, Chris

Poetry. Taking formal and methodological inspiration from the speedcore, thrash-jazz "miniatures" of John Zorn's Naked City, the poems of TORTURE GARDEN: NAKED CITY PASTORELLES are dense, impacted crystals of reference and insinuation: Hegel to Hüsker Dü; Milton to Moorcock; a high-style restaurant on Edinburgh's Royal Mile to the Meadowlands; Ruskin to webcam S&M. These concentrated bursts of cynicism, rancor, and frustrated lyricism are not minima moralia for an electronic age, but literate squawks thrown at the screen of contemporaneity's faceless spectacle.

Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles

Scroggins, Mark

Poetry. "It's difficult to say just how one knows that a certain person's poems are the result of much hard work, and it's as difficult to say just how one knows that a writer took great pleasure in the act of composition. But we've all seen enough smug, dull poems come down the pike to know what lazy, bored poets produce, and so perhaps we assume diligence and enthusiasm simply by way of our own great pleasure in having worked through a particular poem or set of them."&mdash;Graham Foust

A Real Time of It

Delehant, Sally

Poetry. THE PLATFORMIST is Chuck Stebelton's second full-length book of poems and his first published by The Cultural Society.

The Platformist

Stebelton, Chuck

Poetry. What does the mind do with its own "excessive novelty," the efflorescence of consciousness that saturates the world, at once waste and grace? in PHOSPHORESCENCE OF THOUGHT, Peter O'Leary contemplates the frothing song of a house Wren as an instance of this "fluid exuberance" of mind. And like the bird's song, his poetry unfurls a work of evolutionary wonder: exhilarating in its creative force, virtuosic in its repetitions and variations, and mournful in the face of environmental devastations.

Phosphorescence of Thought

Poetry. Shannon Tharp's poetry continues to develop and expand in this collection, her second book. Though economy remains a guidepost along the way, readers of Ms Tharp's work will find a new depth and range in these poems.

Vertigo in Spring

Tharp, Shannon

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