Oneiromance

Kathleen Rooney

Switchback Books, 2008

$14

Kathleen Rooney's Oneiromance echoes Lincoln's sentiment of Niagra Falls -- "Never dried, never froze, never slept, never rested --" It is an epithalamion full of life and movement, enjoyable niblets -- "nunfits," "Bluestocking scholars" -- and enjoyable lines -- "We wish on a fishbone, though fish don't / have wishdones ..." "The room & his trusty sidekick the groom," "Lawn mowers / moan like the ghosts of generals./ Cicadas drone like the ghosts of American-/made cars," "Legends ionize the air," and "Rosa rugosa creeps from the pergola / to the groom's throat." [Evan Fleischer]

Cancer Mon Amour

Kathrin Schaeppi

Winterling Press/Dusie Chap Kollektiv, 2009

All gasp and tension, any moment something could happen. Something bad. To be “scaaared” - oh soscared. Cancer Mon Amour moves like its cover image says it will: “REPEAT” “STOP”. Back into treatment. Memory. Remembering Mother’s treatment. Inescapable mortality. Is there “any god in this”? These pulsing prose poems of helping a friend through illness - of “volatile amour” - are urgent in their telling. i love i love i love notarikons punctuate the chap as abbreviations of our complicated relationships with our own humanness and with each other. With much love, Schaeppi has used her words to “sew pearls onto branches.” [Cara Benson]

City of Moths
Sampson Starkweather
Rope-a-Dope Press, 2008
$10.00

“This is one of those stories with a boy and a girl. Spark, chasm, spark.” Starkweather’s prose poems suggest epistolary but whom is he writing to? A girl? Us? Himself? None of the above or all of the above? So goes the machinations of Starkweather’s mind, eschewing straightforward logic, the narrative of these poems accumulate and blur, while the language vacillates between coo and rage. “In war, when enemies speak different languages it is said to make the killing easier, as for love...” Or to read City of Moths is to know everything and nothing all at once. [Steven Karl]

The Marble Palace
J. Mae Barizo
Fields Press, 2008
$10.00

“In the dream the season./ Water on the lash then further down./ We kept hinged for the most part in an uneasy/ crowd. Blue undiluted, no leaf cover.” The opening stanzas of Barizo’s second chapbook finds the poet fragmenting her finely attuned sense of lyric so she can arrange, rearrange, or derange the world one segment at a time. These poems give you the expanse of the sky and the hairline fracture of the ice. “The citizens here are like watermarks, I said./ A stain or/ leaving no trace of it./ Which are you./ Pick one.” [Steven Karl]

Dead Letters
Alan May
BlazeVOX, 2008
$16

Situated between abjection and negation, May’s playful minimalism explores disquieting gaps and valences in a de-centered Southern landscape, revealing various forms of poetic/cultural dementia; there’s Oedipal drama, abcedariums, a parrot named Absalom, the blank stare of aporia, whimsy as heart punch, and well, angel pee. The poems are narrative and nonsensical, but the language that remains gleefully unassimilated into larger conceptual/formal armatures glowers most insistently: "The verse consumed behemoth / as tilted the metropolis"; "By beyond deserve never mind / Me molecule Genghis Khan." Illustrations by Tom Wegrzynowski and May himself add additional doses of creepy pleasure. [Tim Earley]

Whim Man Mammon
Abraham Smith
Action Books, 2007
$12

Whim Man Mammom reveals Abraham Smith (an unearthly virtuoso of a reader) as magisterial scarecrow, addled charmer, divinator of pine and snout, anti-bowdlerizer, chirruper of harvest desire, infinitely fiddle tongued, carnal fish burglar rent with high lonesome chilblains, ravine-nerved, gasoline holy, wrought from crow caul and rakish angles, monstrous harmonica, taut and jittery in wave after wave of amens, snake-bit heaver, iridescent arsonist, stammering and coyote hopeful, Kandinsky in Wisconsin, amnesia porn flee on the leg of night, apparational folk singer in a blaze of bootlegged days, or, more simply, his is the ontology of the sacred juke. [Tim Earley]

Areas of Fog
Joseph Massey
Shearsman, 2009
$16.00

Massey's first proper collection bundles work from his brilliant chapbooks with new poems. Casting a transparent eyeball on Humboldt County, California, his style vibrates with tones of Niedecker, Schuyler, and a 21st-century American Basho. Such short, haiku-esque poems can go very wrong very quickly, but Massey makes it seem easy as breathing. Not simply "nature poems," these exacting observations of the physical world -- "moonlight a bat bats / above the / shattered plum blossoms" -- fulfill Emerson's charge of having “no covenants but proximities” in a most sublime manner. [Michael Schiavo]






Land of Amnesia
Joseph Bathanti
Press 53
$12

In Land of Amnesia, Joseph Bathanti moves from Anson County dialect to biological specificity to spiritual erudition with grit and grace. The “Christ-haunted landscape" of this collection has a Catholic sensibility, seeing saints and monks among rural North Carolinians, the sacred in the profane. Bathanti’s poems are heartbreaking and profound, the language and observations nuanced and complex, as he engages with and honors the terrible and the beautiful in our everyday lives. [Debra Kaufman]