If you see something you'd like, click place an order.
New Books - 06/08
Come the Harvest by Paul Hunter ($14.95 Silverfish Review) Paul Hunter is a storyteller and a teacher, and this is his third collection of poems telling, and learning from, stories of the increasingly invisible life in
American agrarian towns and homes. The over-arching sentiment here is
mournful, but his poems are not without humor: where might a poem beginning,
"Edwin had one cow so smart." be headed? Hunter's affection for his
characters is deep, as with the illiterate ranch hand who'd been kept out of
school by his family because "seemed they needed me / more than I needed
myself." Included in this work is a sense of morality stemming from the need
to work together, humans and their animals, to survive the difficulties of
farming life. To "spare the horses" one walks uphill alongside the laden
cart instead of riding. And Hunter offers likely the biggest lesson of all
to learn from life on the land, "others / nearby will go on / as if you had
never been / one with the world / one in a rare atmosphere."
King Baby by Lia Purpura ($14.95 Alice James) This is a wonder of a book: a sequence of short lyric poems rising from a lively imagination's attention to a found object. The object is King Baby, a wood and gourd doll with
shells attached to it by thread, found in a freezing river by Purpura's
young son. The untitled poems orbit King Baby like planets around a sun.
King Baby is the subject of direct address -- "Popular thought went crazy: /
we must have found you / for a reason! / Forgive us such arrogance, / ... why
wouldn't we be / odd light come to the planet / just for you?" And King Baby
is an object of adoration. At one point Purpura walks around her city
looking for a blue boat to settle the doll in "to remind you of home."
Instead she finds countless blue, insufficient things. Finally she sees
weathered blue chairs and imagines propping King Baby "among the waves of
blue / that so nearly knocked me out, coming as they did / when I thought I
couldn't make a thing for you." Each of the lyrical pieces in this book has
its special glow. Taken as a whole they vividly explore perspective and
imagination -- "that plastic bag, crumpled / and rifled by wind so
resembles / a hurt pigeon, I can hardly / walk past without stopping to
help." King Baby and the human will to magic and mystery live so clearly in
this book.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind is one of the totemic
books of the Beat era. Published in 1958, the beginning of a time of great
social change, it was written by a man whose influence on America's literary
world -- as publisher, bookseller, poet -- has been profound. To mark the
volume's 50th anniversary, New Directions has reissued it as a snazzy
hardcover in two versions -- the regular edition, priced at $23.95, and an
edition limited to 200 copies, priced at $100, which comes in a slipcase and
has been signed by the 89-year-old Ferlinghetti. Both editions include a CD
of the poet reading works recorded recently and in 1957.
King of Shadows by Aaron Shurin ($16.95 City Lights) Like the flowers
he describes with such savory accuracy, poet Aaron Shurin's essays gathered
together make for a captivating bouquet, a compelling mix of autobiography
and social and literary history and criticism. The pieces glide from the
informative to the delightful to the touching, gracefully removing the
ampersand that separates life & art. He writes as a voracious reader, a gay
man who came of age in the heady 60's and came through the ravages of AIDS,
a poet whose mentors included both Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, and a
canny observer of flora and fauna (humans included and himself in the
bunch). His prose is often lyrical, at times rocking with iambic motion,
perhaps not unusual for one smitten with Shakespeare at an early age -- "I
pluck a bay leaf, crumple it and sniff: Its menthol pierces the front lobe
of your brain like a tiny needle, but it's a good pain...." It's a pleasure
to follow Shurin's attention, whether it's turned toward gay bars or birds or
Proust. "[T]he poem's everyday agenda," he writes, "is to read the world's
hidden text of correspondences." That seems to be his everyday agenda no
matter what he's doing.
We're delighted to announce that Aaron Shurin will read at Open
Books on October 3rd.
The Most of It by Mary Ruefle ($11.95 Wave) Mary Ruefle is known for
her striking poetry -- charming, unsettling lyrics that cast an unusual
light across the world. Her newest book presents her unique vision in short
fiction. Though her pieces are brushed with dry humor, within them hovers a
struggle, dissonance, or even transgression, and through its contemplation,
a kind of redemption, peace, or revelation arrives, and not necessarily an
expected or comfortable one. Here is a section from "The Bench," in which a
wife, who wants to buy a five foot bench, describes an argument with her
husband, who wants what he says is a more logical four foot one --
"I said what mattered most to me was the idea of the bench, the look of
it there, to be gazed at with only the vaguest notion it could hold more
people than would ever actually sit down. The life of the bench in my
imagination was more important than any practical function the bench might
serve. After all, I argued, we wanted a bench so that we could look at it,
so that we could imagine sitting on it, so that, unexpectedly, a bird might
sit on it, or fallen leaves, or inches of snow, and the longer the bench,
the greater the expanse of plank, the more it matched its true function,
which was imaginary. My husband mentioned money and I said that I was
happier to have no bench at all, which would cost nothing, than to have a
four foot bench, which would be expensive. I said that having no bench at
all was closer to the five foot bench than the four foot bench because
having no bench served the imagination in similar ways, and so not having a
bench became an option in our argument, became a third bench."
And take a look at our June 2008 calendar for a description of Raymond McDaniel's new book, Saltwater Empire ($16 Coffee House).
|
