Undersleep
Julie Doxsee
Octopus Books, 2008
$12

Doxsee’s work in Undersleep shows preference for a style of brevity rooted in the American tradition of imagism. But unlike many contemporary examples of this tradition, however, her verse is not bounded by stark realism but instead ventures into landscapes where images flow together with the disturbing pace of a fever-dream and the logic of tones mixed from the material and the chimerical. The strangeness and layers of emotion alone makes this book worth reading. [R. Clark Morrow]

Poker
Tomaž Šalamun (trans. Joshua Beckman)
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008
$15

This beautiful little book, a new edition of Tomaž Šalamun’s first translated by Joshua Beckman and the author, Poker is obsessed with lexicology and ontology—the names of things and their being—culminating in a dictionary of nonsense terms. Šalamun, as Matthew Rohrer says in the introduction, has a “gravitas,” but it’s paired with a playful sense of comedy: “I love this kind of seriousness.” [Elisa Gabbert]