If you see something you'd like, click place an order.
New Books - 05/09
Though Robyn Schiff has had to cancel her trip to Seattle and her reading at Open Books, we still want to tell you about her new book, Revolver ($16 University of Iowa). Her second collection, it is a subtle tour-de-force, an utterly original melding of the historical and the contemporary in poems one unrolls with increasing fascination, as if they were scrolls both beautiful and strange. Fearless, tender, unsettling, illuminating, and on occasion humorous, her work presents the world, particularly the human-made one, through unusual detail -- de la Rue’s envelope machine, J.A. Henkel’s silverware, Ralph Lauren’s Winchester tote, Mrs. Colt’s wedding cake adorned with sugar pistols, the H5N1 influenza virus (how timely), the Lustron home. And feeling is filtered -- gracefully, musically -- through all that detail -- “I once / mailed myself my sportsman’s knife in / a box sealed so tight I could not open / it without what was inside and my heart flipped / the various blades open / in silence inside the closed box. What vault, / what depository. What catalog / of hot tools. Splayed it is // a bouquet of all the ways a point mutates.”
Brief News about a Few of the New
From Copper Canyon comes Gregory Orr’s How Beautiful the Beloved ($16), his follow-up volume to his well-received, transcendent collection, Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved.
Rita Dove’s Sonata Mulattica ($24.95 Norton) is a lyrical narrative based on the life of George Polgreen Bridgetower, a mixed race violin virtuoso who was mentored by Beethoven.
Host Publications has brought out After Dinner Declarations ($25), a substantial collection by the iconoclastic, charmingly irritated Chilean Nicanor Parra, widely known for his anti-poems!
The intellectually and emotionally vigorous Allen Grossman has a new collection of prose, True-Love: Essays on Poetry and Valuing, ($24) from the University of Chicago Press.
And take a look at our calendar of events for May 2009, where you'll find write-ups of...
Idra Novey's The Next Country and Carey Salerno's Shelter, http://www.openpoetrybooks.com/calendar/archives/000354.html
Carol Levin's Red Rooms and Others, http://www.openpoetrybooks.com/calendar/archives/000356.html
Peter Ludwin's A Guest in All Your Houses, and Michael Spence's Crush Depth. http://www.openpoetrybooks.com/calendar/archives/000357.html
|
