reviews

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”…

by Melissa Kwasny
Milkweed Editions 2011
Reviewed by Wendy S. Walters

“If that is true, then whose soul is this?”

A frequent element of the prose poem experiment is a wish to seize the unattainable. Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations dramatizes a struggle with such a contradiction—to want to know everything and to recognize that absolute knowledge assures one’s own destruction. Exhilaration and suffering manifest as inevitable consequences of longing, for which no resistance suffices. Only through a momentary re-imagining of space, often through intoxication, can one endure desire. Echoes of this theme can be found in René Char’s earliest “aphoristic verses,” which evoke a sense of displacement…

by Anthony McCann
Wave Books 2011
Reviewed by Matt Hart

“And stood there all naked and human and shaking”

I.

I ♥ Your Fate is as electrified as it is buttery, as glue-faced as it is full of angles and soul—constant surprises, the turnings of corners, trap doors, blinding sunrises, Samuel Taylor Coleridge!—why can I not just type out all of the poems here and call it a day?—alibis forever, the visitor’s locker room, which turns out to be a vagina—an interview with Kobe Bryant—O beautiful for “EAGLES/big as nouns,” “…something as thoughtful as chairs in the snow…”  I could go on forever.  It goes on forever.  Figuring and reconfiguring—and then it ends, leaving me to retrace my steps, with …

by Anna Moschovakis
Coffee House Press 2011
Reviewed by Rachel Mennies

“HUMAN MACHINE:”

The Internet feels different after I finish reading You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake. Throughout the collection, Anna Moschovakis mines the Internet’s various engines and portals—Craigslist, Wikipedia, MySpace—for subject matter, reflecting back to us, her readers and the Internet’s reliable users, the complicated and troublesome material it holds. We move quickly and boldly from nature to cyberspace.

In the collection’s first half, Moschovakis shows us a world both hunting and hunted, using anaphora to craft scenes of human struggle against industry and scenarios testing our moral resolves. Variations…

Edited by Bob Holman and Carol Muske-Dukes
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2011
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

“We dead or that’s Toledo up ahead”

Carol Muske-Dukes and Bob Holman have edited a truly collaborative poem, a renga written by a diverse contingent of 54 American poets. Part of Eric Fischl’s multidisciplinary effort to foster a dialogue by bringing artists and their art to communities across the US, Crossing State Lines: An American Renga wants to speak to a larger audience; and, despite this ambitious, rather self-congratulatory editorial agenda, and being saddled with an unpromising title vaguely recalling that seemingly endless series of lame pop bands with continental names, it largely succeeds.

Traditionally,…

by Laura McCullough
Alice James Books 2011
Reviewed by Rachel Bara

“…less than half a cigarette’s time”

Shore towns of New Jersey with community pools, splintered boardwalks, and trashy dance clubs provide the setting for Laura McCullough’s searing fourth collection of poems, Panic. McCullough navigates the lives of the shore’s denizens, tracking their responses to a world of shabby artifice and ineluctable danger. For example, “Sun Dog, Moon Ring, Glory” begins:

 

What is the opposite of decapitation,
a clean-through, laser-like amputation
of a girl’s feet in midair
on a ride at the Sea Bright Pier?

As the sun goes down in the town of Sea Bright, the speaker looks for “mock suns”…

by Shira Dentz
Shearsman Books 2010
Reviewed by Cindy Hochman

“glossy oval backs”

Despite the achromics in the title of her book, Shira Dentz utilizes color to paint what mourning looks like: not funereal black, but green. Beginning with two epigraphs (“the appetite//for comfort went looking//inner, tonal//for where the green begins” by Fanny Howe and “a thousand needlesful of green & blue thread” by Francis Ponge), these poems are a study of loss in living color, a valiant attempt to breathe life into a brother who died in childhood.  From the Whitmanesque, but melancholy title of the opening poem, “The Grasses Unload Their Grief,” and throughout the book, the poet unloads a heavy burden; if there is…

by Paul Muldoon
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2010
Reviewed by Erin Lynn

“…for having acted on a whim”

Commonly dubbed a “poet’s poet,” Paul Muldoon is well-known for his obscurity of references and ambitious rhyme schemes. His latest collection, Maggot, fits this mold, and is made up mainly of sequence poems, with sonnets and other shorter poems scattered throughout. It begins with “Plan B,” a sequence poem which was published separately in collaboration with photographer Norman McBeath in 2009. While readers of Plan B in its original volume had McBeath’s images to guide them through the poem, those coming to the poem in Maggot must simply rely on Muldoon’s vivid images, their own historical…

by Pattiann Rogers
Trinity University Press 2010
Reviewed by Lucy Bryan Green

“bestowal of meaning”

Does moral reasoning still matter when we see ourselves as specks on a pearl of a planet in an infinitely unfolding cosmos? How might we have a fulfilling spirituality in a universe indifferent to our existence? In The Grand Array: Writings on Nature, Science, and Spirit, Pattiann Rogers explores in prose many of the questions that propel her eleven books of poetry. Written and recorded over thirty years, these eighteen essays and three interviews wade into moral and scientific waters often left to priests, philosophers, and astronomers. These affirm Rogers’ s claim that creative writers have a unique opportunity to “expose…