Microreview...ahem...Tuesday

Measuring Tape For The Midwest
Noah Falck
Pavement Saw, 2008
$7.00

The conversational tongue that resides inside Measuring Tape of the Midwest is the one that brings these poems together. Imbued with trenchant humor, incongruous ideas are released from the poet’s endless register of imaginative images that indulge in the very best of American miscellany. Reading these poems one gets the sense he is rewriting history (“today is a new version of yesterday“), employing his paraphernalia as tools for building upon the melancholic everyday, a process that overall proves to be most profound. [Brian Foley]






Spring
Oni Buchanan
University of Illinois Press, 2008
$17.95

In Spring, Oni Buchanan does not shy from taking on larger metaphysical themes or delving into the didactic. Her verse comes in uncommon variety— often built with a strong sense of form, other times as experiments in visual and grammatical breaks calling to mind the playfulness of Cummings, or going even further to rely on the pure mathematics of language to do the heavy lifting. If none of these things puts you off, you will likely enjoy this book. [R. Clark Morrow]

Microreview Monday

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]

More Wicked Deals Witch Are Wicked Awesome

Beginning at 12:00 AM on Monday (5/18), through 11:59 PM on Sunday (5/24), any purchase of one of Scape by Joshua Harmon will get a FREE COPY of A Useless Window by Carrie Olivia Adams. These two books will have you writhing in agony...NOT. Harmon and Adams both have a facility with syntax and grammar that I find entirely enviable and amazing. They are poets I often find myself i awe of. Check out both books this week for only $12.95--as always, all our orders automatically come with free shipping!

New Wiki for Readings and Independent Bookstores

As you know, we at Black Ocean believe in the power of the public reading—the pleasure of hearing words put to voice, the sense of literary community that can develop, and of course, the hand-to-hand, face-to-face promotional opportunity. All of us—readers, writers, publishers—are often looking for readings to support in our own cities and looking for places to promote our work and read with far away friends old and new.

Thus, I am excited to announce a new updatable, searchable Wiki for curated reading series and independent bookstores eager to host events throughout the country (and hopefully abroad). Myself, as both poet and poetry editor, I’ve been frustrated with the lack of an electronic resource or directory for finding such series and bookstores, so I decided to take matters into my own hands.

I invite and encourage you to add to and update this Wiki so that it can be the most current and comprehensive possible. It’s still a bit rough, and I hope to further develop it with your help. I hope this information can be of great use to all of us in our travels, tours, and plot to take over the world with our words.

Go here to add and update information: http://carrieo80.wiki.zoho.com/

Many thanks and cheers!

—Carrie

Microreview Monday

Dear Ra
Johannes Goransson
Starcherone, 2008
$16.00

The flinches of Dear Ra consist of confessions, cautions, and insincere apologies. "If the ship is sinking don't make love to the rats." Like Burroughs without the slamming boys, it's a constantly-changing party line. It's "a Haiku about Bang-Bang-Ugh." Too many poems these days are really surrealist novels in hiding; it's nice to see one that comes into the clear. [John Cotter]

My W/hole Aesthetic
Matthew Henriksen
Cannibal Books, 2008
$5.00

In this 7-page lyric manifesto, Henriksen oscillates, with equal parts wisdom and contempt, between negative capability—poet as receptacle—and positive capability—poet as God. He writes: “This cavity of forgiveness (a lie) / and love (a lie we make into birds): Sparrow! Irony makes the / stilled wings flutter with my heartbeat!” With his signature rawness and beauty, Henriksen reminds us of the most primitive struggles and pleasures of poetry. [Chris Tonelli]