reviews

Sentimental Spectacular, Nate Pritts (Mondo Bummer, 2010)

Nate Pritts’ chapbook Sentimental Spectacular contains five poems, a short collection, even for a chapbook. Though slight, Sentimental Spectacular mines the sentimental for careful, specific image and sound, crafting a work that’s, yes, deeply sentimental, but one willing both to celebrate its sentimentality and to search for a major key of resonance in its reader.  “Darling, darling, darling,” reads the title poem, “there’s something sensational in the way / my heart takes on different forms.” (It is probably worth noting that the poet has also published a book called Sensational Spectacular.) We encounter the speaker’s heart—large, lush,…

by Kate Colby
Ugly Duckling Presse 2011
Reviewed by Wendy S. Walters

“…and shrink with me”

Kate Colby’s The Return of the Native draws several of its poem titles from Thomas Hardy’s tragic novel of same name, which explored gender politics and foiled ambitions at the beginning of the modern era.  The novel’s frank portrayal of a shifting mindset about religion and new ways of thinking about the role of women in English society was ahead of its time.  Hardy’s detailed realism inspired empathy for his female characters especially, without the veil of romance to distract attention from their choices and faults.  Colby, in her work, seems less interested in generating strong feelings for a character than she does…

by Jenny Boully
Tarpaulin Sky Press 2011
Reviewed by Kate Angus

“The moon tonight so full, so full of cradles outgrown.”

The best folk tales and children’s stories are the dark ones, the ones that hint at the world and human relations as they really are and so continue to haunt our adult dreams, shocking us awake to reel at the true terrors of abandonment, our inevitable decay, heartbreak, betrayal, and loss. The act of parsing out and presenting these adult truths from beneath the veils of children’s fantasy is the project at the heart of Jenny Boully’s masterful new book, not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them. The book is a brilliant alternate version of J. M. Barrie’s classic children’s book Peter…

by Alice Notley
Penguin Books 2011
Reviewed by Diana Arterian

“my smoothing wilderness of righteousness”

Alice Notley puts forth work of quality at a startling clip – about thirty books in forty years, with each volume of poems markedly different from the previous. She won me over with Descent of Alette (1996), which I happily discovered organically after reading her notes on her late husband Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets, then her At Night The States, and finally Coming After: Essays on Poetry, in which she includes her lecture on the feminine epic and what inspired Alette. Like Alette, Culture of One is a book-length poem—“a novel in poems,” as Penguin advertises—with a female protagonist. Visually, the book…

by Susan Briante
Ahsahta Press 2011
Reviewed by Gina Myers

“Why should we want to confine ourselves in two’s or five’s or cities?”

On her author page on Ahsahta Press’s website, Susan Briante writes, “[T]he lyric is a space of thoughtful speculation, a call for action or witnessing, a place where imagining can become an act of deep sympathy, where we might recognize connections and complicities.” And this is precisely the type of lyric the reader encounters in Briante’s newest collection of poems, Utopia Minus. The title, taken from Robert Smithson’s A Guide to the Monuments of Passaic New Jersey, focuses on a “ruin in reverse” where buildings “don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise …

by Diann Blakely
Elixir Press 2008
Reviewed by Allston James

“the Mississippi / pulsing beyond”

Raised in Montgomery, Alabama during the white-heat years of the Civil Rights Movement and living in northern California and New York 30 years hence, I am perplexed when asked, “What was the South like then?” My short answer is, to grow up a white boy in Alabama during that era was to grow up schizophrenic. Westminster Presbyterian Church, where I spent most Sundays, raised hymns on high announcing all men are brothers and then in syncopated breath the congregation voice-voted to keep a black family from joining the church. I recall a birthday party for white kids at a city park where we were denied entry at the gates because officials…

by Keith Ekiss
New Issues 2010
Reviewed by Emily Anderson

“adobe on sky”

Keith Ekiss focuses intently on the American Southwest in Pima Road Notebook. The physical landscape provides an underpinning for poems that move through personal memory, historical research, and commentary on contemporary culture.  In “The Desert,” for example, Ekiss juxtaposes desert images a reader might expect (rattlesnakes, scorpions, saguaros) with a critical vision of modern development.  After describing some of the dangers of the landscape, he concludes: “What threatens will disappear. // Hurry home, the future all fairway and green, / targeted with ribbons and stakes.”

Throughout the book, Ekiss writes about southwestern…

Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner (The Physiocrats 2011)

In Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner ponders whether any emotional response to art or religion is purely an affectation or desperate insistence on more than the “actual.” This chapbook is an excerpt from the poet’s novel of same name, published this year by Coffee House Press. Any overlap between real and fictive is beside the point, but it is worth noting that both Lerner and his narrator Adam received Fulbrights to work and study in Spain, and both grew up in Kansas. In Leaving the Atocha Station, Adam does what we might imagine a real Fulbright poet does: gives readings, has conversations, smokes spliffs, visits museums. He lets us observe one particular…

by Minnie Bruce Pratt
Carolina Wren Press 2011
Reviewed by Alyse Bensel

“…my tongue and brain at a low wage”

Minnie Bruce Pratt, winner of the 1989 Lamont Poetry Prize for her collection Crime Against Nature, continues her engagement with American political discourse in her tenth book, Inside the Money Machine. With this collection, Pratt takes a firm stance on minority rights and generally tackles the enormous political reality of American capitalism. She takes on a rich source, Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, which shapes the arc of the book.

By viewing American capitalism through a Marxist lens, Pratt questions the monotony of labor—tasks repeated day after day in a mailroom, or a tollbooth, or a salon—inviting…

by Henri Cole
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2011/2009
Reviewed by James Cihlar

“…to the whiteness of death”

Henri Cole’s new book of poetry, Touch, follows Pierce the Skin, which selected poems from his six collections published between 1987 and 2007. In the context of his work-to-date, Touch only gains in significance.

Although Cole’s The Visible Man was perhaps his most notable encounter with autobiography and gay identity when it came out in 1998, many of his abiding concerns and conceits have been present from the beginning. Despite the ongoing evolution of style and substance in his work, Cole has consistently written contemporary lyrics. Sometimes commemorative, as in “To the Forty-third President”…