New California Poetry
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Myung Mi Kim's <I>Commons </I>weighs on the most sensitive of scales the minute grains of daily life in both peace and war, registering as very few works of literature have done our common burden of being subject to history. Abstracting colonization, war, immigration, disease, and first-language loss until only sparse phrases remain, Kim takes on the anguish and displacement of those whose lives are embedded in history.<br /><br />Kim's blank spaces are loaded silences: openings through which readers enter the text and find their way. These silences reveal gaps in memory and articulate experiences that will not translate into language at all. Her words retrieve the past in much the same way the human mind does: an image sparks another image, a scent, the sound of bombs, or conversation. These silences and pauses give the poems their structure.<br /><br /><I>Commons'</I>s fragmented lyric pushes the reader to question the construction of the poem. Identity surfaces, sinks back, then rises again. On this shifting ground, Kim creates meaning through juxtaposed fragments. Her verse, with its stops and starts, its austere yet rich images, offers splinters of testimony and objection. It negotiates a constantly changing world, scavenging through scraps of experience, spaces around words, and remnants of emotion for a language that enfolds the enormity of what we cannot express.
Writing the Silences
The poems in <i>Writing the Silences</i> represent more than 60 years of Richard O. Moore’s work as a poet. Selected from seven full-length manuscripts written between 1946 and 2008, these poems reflect not only Moore’s place in literary history—he is the last of his generation of the legendary group of San Francisco Renaissance poets—but also his reemergence into today’s literary world after an important career as a filmmaker and producer in public radio and television. <i>Writing the Silences</i> reflects Moore’s commitment to freedom of form, his interest in language itself, and his dedication to issues of social justice and ecology.
Sleeping with the Dictionary
Harryette Mullen's fifth poetry collection, <I>Sleeping with the Dictionary, </I>is the abecedarian offspring of her collaboration with two of the poet's most seductive writing partners, <I>Roget's Thesaurus </I>and <I>The American Heritage Dictionary. </I>In her ménage à trois with these faithful companions, the poet is aware that while <I>Roget </I>seems obsessed with categories and hierarchies, the <I>American Heritage, </I>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 <I>Oulipo, </I>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.<br /><br />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.»
Dark Archive
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.<br /><br />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’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, <i>Voyager</i> 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’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.»
Green is the Orator
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.
