Poetry. With patience and precision, Hannah Brooks-Motl's third collection of poems, EARTH, explores the grand themes of love, family, economy, and home with the skill of a true craftsman. As the measured compositions of these poems shift, so do their near-sculptural forms, and a feeling both classical and contemporary develops as a result. At times a paean to poetry, other times a critique of it, EARTH is a breakthrough collection by a poet whose ceaselessly sharp intellect continues to use poetry to gain insight into not only her own wants and needs, but ours, and those of poetry itself.

Earth (The Song Cave)

Literature & Fiction

Brooks-Motl, Hannah

Poetry

The Song Cave

Poetry. Edited by Ben Estes and Alan Felsenthal. Introduction by Geof Hewitt. Though Hamilton wrote thousands of poems during his lifetime, only a small percentage of them ever found their way into print. His poems appeared in small poetry journals during the 60s, 70s and 80s; two chapbooks, The Big Parade and Sphinx; and one full-length collection, The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton, published by The Jargon Society in 1970. In this new volume, Ben Estes and Alan Felsenthal present a collection of Hamilton's poems from these publications, along with many of Hamilton's poems that were previously considered lost and poems from posthumously found notebooks. "Hamilton is the author of spare, wry, slightly surreal poems that have, so far as I can see, no real equivalent in American English."—Ron Silliman "Alfred Starr Hamilton 'wrote to the governor of poetry / And simply signed [his] own name.' Consider this collection—assembled by two very dedicated allographers—an essential expansion on said letter. People who've encountered Hamilton's work previously will be glad for the chance to see familiar poems alongside many marvelous new ones. And how I envy first-time readers of this most generous and genuine American writer."—Graham Foust "It is a hidden world, a hushabye place that Alfred Starr Hamilton occupies, a secluded place where he is free to summon daffodils and stars, chimes and angels, thread and old-fashioned spoons. There is Hungarian damage, blue revolutionary stars, a sedge hammer (which is not a typo). He is obsessively drawn to fine metals—bronze, silver and gold. He would be golden, but can never grasp the elusive sad: 'One cloud, one day / Came as a shadow in my life / And then left, and came back again; and stayed' like "Anything Remembered" which is the title of that poem. He is too removed to see things any other way but his own. It is a silver peepshow in the wonderbush, and there is always a moon to scrape from the bottom of his view."—C. D. Wright "We are living in the Badlands. Dorothy's ruby-slippers would get you across the Deadly Desert. So will these poems."—Jonathan Williams

A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind: The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton

Hamilton, Alfred Starr

Poetry. Jane Gregory's MY ENEMIES records a poet's search for meaning in a landscape of combined and dissolving definitions. Affirming disaster and its beyond, these poems sing toward belief—a self-made belief that will not rely on any static symbol or logic or idol. Gregory's dynamic, unpredictable enactments of the modern world avow vulnerability to a belief compatible with self-consciousness. Sometimes triumphant, sometimes overcome or self-ruinous, MY ENEMIES never halts in its search for definition, even when it claims to not have been written—as in the serial "Book I Will Not Write" poems. Each poem here establishes a new, necessary material and mode for our uncertain world that can offer its readers something to believe in; despite forces internal and external that try to undo us, Gregory's poems redo that undoing until "my enemies" becomes instead "my eyes many," a new sonic way of seeing. "When Jane Gregory speaks of 'enemies' she speaks of those elements that (following Valéry) ravage books and people alike: fire, humidity, wild animals, time, and their own inner content. Gregory knows how to let those elementals run free in her own words, and to make a friend of their disequilibrating energy. Her work renews romanticism in the twilight of time, knowing that even the spelling of words is the spilling of everything they cannot say. Here, the poet has overwritten the multiples of her 'Book I Will Not Write' with 'the fire in the ocean'—with words that, reduced to their very atoms, 'in the dark: s,i,n,g.'"—Andrew Joron "Jane Gregory's MY ENEMIES is a collection of high-stepping verses of live wires where every phrase is a detonation od swings, breaks and pops! Thrillers 'suitable for blasting' (viz. 'guncotton')—pages of startling figures, near rhymes and off rhymes, psychological, philosophical, ecological myths and near myths, sci-fi and paranormal references, and the multiple 'Book[s] I Will Not Write.' Look at the word 'struggle' enough times in one stanza, and you suddenly see infinity, and as Baudelaire wrote, 'There is no point as sharp as that of the Infinite.' This book is 'so gone beyond' any you've ever seen."—Norma Cole "Jane Gregory seems to take seriously Robert Duncan's claim that 'I make poetry as other men make war or make love or make states or revolutions.' In MY ENEMIES she lays claim to his statement on her own terms when she says 'I recognize the tongue of the wolf / before it is in the wolf's mouth.' Or, one might also say, she has written an adventurous first book."—Peter Gizzi

My Enemies

Gregory, Jane

Poetry. In his Eclogues, Virgil offers the reader poems about responding—listening, picking out, and answering back the pleasures of song. Nate Klug's RUDE WOODS is an inspired, modern response—a new translation that blends talkative elegance with lyric intensity. "In a manner that is as successful as it is surprising," notes W.R. Johnson in his introduction, "Klug has devised a conversational idiom that relies on spare diction and spare syntax, on a pure clarity of sight and sound to give us superb poems that give Virgil's pure lyricism a genuine 'answering form.'""Translation tends to be either a conspicuous aid to comprehension or that other thing: a strangely impure art form that both mimes and contends with an other. At its best it makes you think and not think about the original; it carries you along in a state of belief even as you remind yourself that there is an older text behind the new song. If the translator-poet strays too far from the colloquial the text hardens, seeming too much like another language; if he or she is too modish it seems as though the earlier poet exists solely to promote the work of the later one. Virgil himself was a modeller of the work of others, as we all are to some degree. It's a delicate balancing act performed well by only the best translators. Nate Klug is of this noble band. 'He cares about poetry' and his Virgil has a lightness of touch that only the best can manage."—Laurie Duggan"Nate Klug's RUDE WOODS renders Virgil in an idiom as honest and appealing as 'ripe apples, cooked chestnuts, and cheese.' Ezra Pound's Propertius comes immediately to mind. These selections evince the same careful attention to the natural rhythms and movement of speech—perfect for a poetic escape into simple pleasures. Yet Klug doesn't skirt an important lesson of the Eclogues: escape is fleeting. Loss, longing, and exile dog even the shepherds in this idyll. They ease their own troubles and 'make the way / less painful, singing and walking, / walking and singing together like this.' Nate Klug confidently reaffirms the abiding comfort of these poems."—John Tipton

Rude Woods

Nate Klug

The painter Trevor Winkfield--born in Leeds in 1944 and residing in New York City since 1969--has been a sought-after contributor to publications such as Arts Magazine, Art in America and Modern Painters for two decades. Editors have long trusted his unique sensibilities and relied on his capacity to usher in fresh understandings of art. Take, for instance, Winkfield’s pure excitement and audacity at weaving the work of the proto-Surrealist author Raymond Roussel into an essay on Leonardo da Vinci’s "Last Supper." Unapologetically the writings of an artist, not a critic, in Georges Braque & Others, Winkfield engages some of the greatest names in art (Vermeer, Chardin, Signac, Ryder, Dadd, Brancusi, Cornell, Duchamp, Johns and of course Braque, among others)--asking questions, seeing the details and sharing the obscure facts that only an artist like Winkfield could notice and convey with such great charm.

Georges Braque & Others: The Selected Art Writings of Trevor Winkfield, 1990-2009

Arts & Photography

Winkfield, Trevor

History & Criticism

Poetry. The poems in Sara Nicholson's THE LIVING METHOD imaginatively grasp the raw materials of nature, calling the reader to the "outer limits of the dark," where one notices the music of the woods and gardens while searching for "the youngest photo of the night." These poems explore and create various orders of images, a mysterious taxonomy of words and scraps of phrases that revive what in lesser hands would remain dying metaphors. Here, in her debut collection, a new and singular poetic logic reveals itself, growing tenderly out of the "droning chamber" of the poet's throat, through Google image searches, and from the rich soil of archaic landscapes. "Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky claimed, 'Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles.' Sara Nicholson makes poems with her hippocampus, that somewhat mysterious part of the brain that deals with memory and spatial recognition in ways we have yet to understand conclusively. Her poems speak to us directly from somewhere in there: 'A queen will dwell in the radius and eat it//but the circumference/will answer without a refrain.' We can hear a voice at once speaking to us while also thinking aloud to itself. These are poems of inquiry without the presumptuous rhetoric, wonder without the rhapsodic glitz, formal control without the self-congratulatory show tune medley. I've read very few poets of my generation who have so decidedly shrugged off pretense and posturing. She's pure hippocampus, navigating the external world from deep within the internal. We hear a voice speaking to us, but that voice comes from a crowded place, amid a thousand thoughts we do not hear. Her poems have no angle. They touch on the occult and hermetic but do not wear them as a shroud. They reach out from the radius into the radiant."—Matthew Henriksen

The Living Method

Nicholson, Sara

Poetry. In ESSAY STANZAS, Thomas Meyer begins modestly by warning the reader: "This won't amount to much." Each of the four poems in this book follow the imagination of the poet through his attempts to map out the human drama as it's reflected in natural elements. Using myths and fairy tales, the Bible and Shakespeare, silver-screen starlets and ancient love songs, Meyer assembles his influences with true compassion, to aid him in pointing out the mysteries of the physical and emotional world around him. The poet's wisdom shines through at every turn: "My shadow, I used to think / backed me up from behind. / Now I realize / I am my shadow's human shield." "Thomas Meyer is a living master. In ESSAY STANZAS, he innovates a form in three of the four poems that make up this magnificent book, compressing Orphic oracle, Faustian apocalypse, oneiric pageant, invented fable, wisdom literature, cryptic joke, disturbing aphorism, epigrammic wit and nervous ruin into sequences of thematically linked stanzas—on the weather, relationships, or enlightenment, for instance. The fourth poem, 'Airs Waters Places,' reveals Meyer's powers completely: a nuptial hymn in a high style as antique as it is absolutely present. No living master is so hidden as Meyer but there's none whose poems we should read more urgently. 'My heart / can't help overhearing / what they say, and try as I might, I / can't stop listening.'"—Peter O'Leary

Essay Stanzas

Meyer, Thomas

Poetry. An extended love letter, Todd Colby's sixth collection SPLASH STATE is filled with humor and charm. These poems are as concerned with aging, time, being, and death as they are with eliminating "the need for anxious circumstances" with facts, instructions, and advice. From extolling the uses of "Shark's Paw" and "Fink Leaf" to "how to look like everything is okay in photographs," Colby's poems opt for the personal and generous, even when his tongue is firmly planted in cheek. If melancholy is just around the corner, these poems will walk with you in the opposite direction. "Todd Colby's poetry radiates the joy of receiving a long-awaited letter. He ends an early poem, 'Sweetie,' with the line 'Let me let me know let me know soon let me know soon Sweetie.' It now seems that Sweetie has replied. In his new collection, SPLASH STATE, he tells us 'You will no longer need a hushed, barely audible tone / to confess your inadequacies because you will no longer have any / to confess'—the ideal state that Auden hoped would 'make us well / without confession of the ill.' With this pleasure comes responsibility, but it's the responsibility to remain in joy.' There won't be a need / for codes or inane principles, because you'll always / be too radiant and purposeful for that.' In SPLASH STATE, a perfect title for the state of calm eagerness he writes out of, Colby discovers that 'There are mornings, and then there are / golden glimpses of something totally / amazing like awe or coffee,' and then that 'Morning will never be called off / due to budgetary constraints, or even heartbreak. / By afternoon, there will be plush green pillows, / strewn on the lawn waiting for my body. / I can hardly wait.' The rest of us no longer have to wait. This dazzling collection confirms Colby's status as one of the finest and funniest poets of his generation."—John Ashbery "I read Todd Colby's SPLASH STATE and I'm here to say that it makes the world better. I mean this because this is a monumental book and in this book, in this stack of love poems, we see that the Romantic has a place again in the everyday, like the 'courtyard' that 'sparkles puppy yellow' with sunlight, the 'Simple Times' when 'bones softened the cars,' and an I that 'blooms out over Brooklyn' are all part of what we do this whole thing for: life. If you like Frank O'Hara, Eileen Myles, John Ashbery, William Blake, and Wallace Stevens, then you are going to like this book. Or I mean to say, that this book is a spell, a love spell. And if you want a book to carry with you when no one seems to care, when no one seems to be your friend, well then, you've found it, it's this book, this book is your love spell, this book is your friend."—Dorothea Lasky

Splash State

Colby, Todd

Poetry. What exactly is an illustrated game of patience? Imagine something like group solitaire within a room full of objects, Duchamp on a TV, some great old albums, voices from a radio or the past, and a set of reverberating cymbals. In Ben Estes's ILLUSTRATED GAMES OF PATIENCE, the game involves sorting through objects and landscapes to reveal their "soft hums of isolation," often in the wake of love. If there is winning involved, the rewards are hope for renewal and a "faith in arranging." Filled with color and light, these poems make vivid the tender details of close observation, "urging love to stretch and green." "This beautiful work of late Romanticism finds Estes often roaming, sometimes making his bed in uncomfortable places, exemplifying patience, to which he at one point builds an actual broad-bodied monument. He is patient because he has the whole world and all of time at his disposal. The poems speak in riddles, impossible questions, vivid sensuous description, and, on one page, doggerel. Scent fetishists will appreciate the descriptions of crotch smells. In fact, there should be something here to satisfy hedonists of all stripes."—Aaron Kunin "Ben Estes's poems, with their piquant accentuation and glorious measured sensuality, remind me a little of James Schuyler's. I also feel: bouquets not previously perceived, a style I can't fully attribute to the twentieth century or any previous. A strange new liberty quietly makes itself known."—Lucy Ives

Illustrated Games of Patience

Estes, Ben

Poetry. With setting moons, talking tulips, and the peacefulness found in a horse's mane, the poems in Christian Schlegel's debut collection HONEST JAMES might be as difficult to describe as the layered notes of an ancient perfume. "A famous notion twirled and froze. I made it mine. / Again it twirled." This unabashedly lyrical collection, which never shies away from rhyme, includes various cameos, including Goethe in its second section, with the end result being what John Ashbery calls "one of the strangest books of poetry to come along in some time." "In Christian Schlegel's HONEST JAMES you'll find literary mannerism lightly wielded, gesture for its own sake, a bit of lace at the cuff. The title—a reference to Wordsworth's Prelude—reflects the antiquing and old world light in these pages. Schlegel knits his syntax to invite the savor of the micro-novelistic vignettes he evokes. Period mood is produced with snippets of Latin and German, a few variations on Goethe. Were it not for his tendency to slip into four-beat rhythm and use rhyme, one could think these poems fragments of memorable lines torn from pre-twentieth-century European fiction. Time to dim the sconces and start dreaming."—Jennifer Moxley "One of the strangest books of poetry to come along in some time, Christian Schlegel's HONEST JAMES seems to draw inspiration from the back corridors and anterooms of poetry. One senses echoes of Kipling, Browning, Landor, even Robert W. Service, and other late 19th-century hot shots, but it doesn't seem to be a question of Schlegel taking cues from other poets, rather his magpie-like attraction to bits of history imbedded in forgotten texts. In a note he tells of using a volume of 'plain prose translations' from Goethe—'consulted sparingly and departed from liberally.' Students of the archaic will find much to detain them here. It's as though a new process of influencing has been unearthed."—John Ashbery "Of equal parts wariness and devotion, music and restraint, wit and loss, these moving poems mark Christian Schlegel as a poet with an astonishing feel for the English language, a living relationship with its literatures, and the gift of a precise wisdom."—Susan Wheeler

Honest James

SCHLEGEL, CHRISTIAN

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