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Sleeping with the Dictionary

Harryette Mullen's fifth poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary, is the abecedarian offspring of her collaboration with two of the poet's most seductive writing partners, Roget's Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary. In her ménage à trois with these faithful companions, the poet is aware that while Roget seems obsessed with categories and hierarchies, the American Heritage, whatever its faults, was compiled with the assistance of a democratic usage panel that included black poets Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, as well as feminist author and editor Gloria Steinem. With its arbitrary yet determinant alphabetical arrangement, its gleeful pursuit of the ludic pleasure of word games (acrostic, anagram, homophone, parody, pun), as well as its reflections on the politics of language and dialect, Mullen's work is serious play. A number of the poems are inspired or influenced by a technique of the international literary avant-garde group Oulipo, a dictionary game called S+7 or N+7. This method of textual transformation–which is used to compose nonsensical travesties reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's «Jabberwocky»–also creates a kind of automatic poetic discourse. Mullen's parodies reconceive the African American's relation to the English language and Anglophone writing, through textual reproduction, recombining the genetic structure of texts from the Shakespearean sonnet and the fairy tale to airline safety instructions and unsolicited mail. The poet admits to being «licked all over by the English tongue,» and the title of this book may remind readers that an intimate partner who also gives language lessons is called, euphemistically, a «pillow dictionary.»

Crowded by Beauty

David Schneider

Philip Whalen was an American poet, Zen Buddhist, and key figure in the literary and artistic scene that unfolded in San Francisco in the 1950s and ’60s. When the Beat writers came West, Whalen became a revered, much-loved member of the group. Erudite, shy, and profoundly spiritual, his presence not only moved his immediate circle of Beat cohorts, but his powerful, startling, innovative work would come to impact American poetry to the present day. Drawing on Whalen’s journals and personal correspondence—particularly with Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder, Kyger, Welch, and McClure —David Schneider shows how deeply bonded these intimates were, supporting one another in their art and their spiritual paths. Schneider, himself an ordained priest, provides an insider’s view of Whalen’s struggles and breakthroughs in his thirty years as a Zen monk. When Whalen died in 2002 as the retired Abbot of the Hartford Street Zen Center, his own teacher referred to him as a patriarch of the Western lineage of Buddhism. Crowded by Beauty chronicles the course of Whalen’s life, focusing on his unique, eccentric, humorous, and literary-religious practice.

Dark Archive

Laura Mullen

Dark archive: The purpose of a dark archive is to function as a repository for information that can be used as a failsafe during disaster recovery. Laura Mullen’s fourth collection is a sequence of beautifully interrelated poems that explores how to accurately represent the reality of change and loss. Mullen pinpoints what is at stake: the possibility of communication and connection—and the hope of intimacy. Invoking Wordsworth’s «I wandered lonely as a cloud,» she pushes experiments in consciousness against their boundaries in an array of poetic forms. Poetic tropes are measured against natural phenomena as Mullen examines what «witness» might mean in the context of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the failures of capitalism to effect social justice, the murder of James Byrd in Texas, the personal loss of a mother figure, and a disintegrating love affair.

Voyager

Srikanth Reddy

Srikanth Reddy’s second book of poetry probes this world’s cosmological relation to the plurality of all possible worlds. Drawing its name from the spacecraft currently departing our solar system on an embassy to the beyond, Voyager unfolds as three books within a book and culminates in a chilling Dantean allegory of leadership and its failure in the cause of humanity. At the heart of this volume lies the historical figure of Kurt Waldheim—Secretary-General of the U.N. from 1972-81 and former intelligence officer in Hitler’s Wehrmacht—who once served as a spokesman for humanity while remaining silent about his role in the collective atrocities of our era. Resurrecting this complex figure, Reddy’s universal voyager explores the garden of forking paths hidden within every totalizing dream of identity.

Metropole

Geoffrey G. O'Brien

Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s third collection opens with a set of lyric experiments whose music and mutable syntax explore the social relations concealed in material things. O’Brien’s poems measure the «vague cadence» of daily life, testing both the value and limits of art in a time of vanishing publics and permanent war. The long title poem, written in a strict iambic prose, charts the disappearance of the poetic into the prosaic, of meter into the mundane, while reactivating the very possibilities it mourns: O’Brien’s prosody invests the prose of things with the intensities of verse. In the charged space of this hybrid form, objects become subjects and sense pivots mid-sentence into song: «The sun revolves around the earth revolves around the sun.»

The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan

Ted Berrigan

Following the highly acclaimed Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, poets Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan, and Edmund Berrigan have collaborated again on this new selection of poems by one of the most influential and admired poets of his generation. Reflecting a new editorial approach, this volume demonstrates the breadth of Ted Berrigan’s poetic accomplishments by presenting his most celebrated, interesting, and important work. This major second-wave New York School poet is often identified with his early poems, especially The Sonnets, but this selection encompasses his full poetic output, including the later sequences Easter Monday and A Certain Slant of Sunlight, as well as many of his uncollected poems. The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan provides a new perspective for those already familiar with his remarkable wit and invention, and introduces new readers to what John Ashbery called the «crazy energy» of this iconoclastic, funny, brilliant, and highly innovative writer. Praise for The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan: "This is a great, great book for all seasons of the mind and heart."—Robert Creeley "Thanks to this invaluable Collected Poems, one can hear, as never before, Ted Berrigan dreaming his dream."—The Nation "The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan is not only one of the most strikingly attractive books recently published, but is also a major work of 20th-century poetry. . . . It is a book that will darken with the grease of my hands. There is no better way to praise it than by saying, ‘If you enjoy poetry, you should have it.’" —Bloomsbury Review "It’s a must-have, a poetic knockout."—Time Out New York

Green is the Orator

Sarah Gridley

Green is the Orator follows on Sarah Gridley’s brilliant first collection, Weather Eye Open , in addressing the challenge of representing nature through language. Gridley’s deftly original syntax arises from direct experience of the natural world and from encounters with other texts, including the Egyptian «Book of the Dead» and the writings of Charles Darwin, Peter Mark Roget, William Morris, William James, and Henri Bergson. Gridley’s own idiom is compressed, original, and full of unexpected pleasures. This unusual book, at once austere and full of life, reflects a penetrating mind at work—one that is thinking through and re-presenting romantic and modernist traditions of nature.

This Was the River

John Pass

Beginning where he left off in crawlspace with “the little start I’m given, giving, that May be,” John Pass’s new poems articulate further entanglements with stasis, purpose and hope. He struggles as we all do under the weight of a world imperilled by climate change and environmental degradation. And the poems, characteristically alive with attuned observation and emotional honesty, glimpse unsettling limitations to our consciousness and conscience. This is particularly so regarding animals in the book’s central sequence, “Creation of the Animals.” Historically and geographically expansive, This Was the River is nonetheless approachably human. “Margined Burying Beetle” (winner of the Malahat Review ’s Open Season Award in 2016) is an astonishing homage to the poet’s mother, one of several pieces touching upon grief and loss. There are joyous poems, too, for the births of his grandchildren, and slyly humorous asides on medical test results and poetry prizes. Pass’s affection and sorrow for the natural world is at the book’s heart, and as a whole This Was the River confirms his reputation as a poet of lyrical eloquence, masterful technique and both intellectual and emotional range.

Belated Bris of the Brainsick

Lucas Crawford

Belated Bris of the Brainsick  traces 1) a belated and in some ways violent revelation about one’s ancestry and one’s past, 2) a resultant mental breakdown and 3) the pursuit of a new life with someone else who lives with mental illness. These events and the styles in which they are told are inflected by queer, transgender and disabled perspectives and aesthetics. If there is a narrative arc to the collection, it is not the usual one of falling ill and then regaining health; rather, it is the pursuit of a “queered” version of health.

Outside, America

Sarah de Leeuw

Outside, America criss-crosses the Canadian–American border to understand dilemmas that occur across a variety of scales, from global spheres to the most intimate domestic spaces. Sarah de Leeuw digs through grief, loss, aging, technological frustration, environmental degradation, nationalism and confusion to grasp the state of the world. These poems are tethered to everything from climate change and scientific discovery to the death of parents, resource extraction, divorce and career changes, touching down on whale extinctions, lounges in international airports and debris slides, on suiciding pilots and sinkholes, astronauts, grocery store magazines, earthquakes and even sinking ferries and pop stars.