Janice Lee, Kerotakis

Janice Lee
image: Janice Lee

Much is happening on the pages of contemporary literature. Yet, it cannot be concluded that events on the page are closely inspired by those occurring in the world. Sometimes, a writer throws its readers for a loop, and it can be a pleasant sensation. Los Angeles-based writer Janice Lee introduces her literary debut Kērotakis: an offering of strangeness, constructed to allow a number of poetic voices ample stage to be heard—these creations sometimes emerge with the intention of folding in on themselves or exploding already-existing limits, reaching far from reality, hinting towards blissful escapism. More »

Published on juli 6, 2010.
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Lily Hoang, The Evolutionary Revolution

Micro chapters that can stand alone or be read in a linear fashion, Lily Hoang’s The Evolutionary Revolution is a book of sly stepping stones, stepping away from the world as it is now. The world as it is now is assumed by many to be out of our hands, something unstable, something that both affects us yet is not within our reach to fix or improve at moments of strife or general concern. Hoang’s chapters have grandiose names such as “The Imperial Council,” “Man Emerging” and “How the Sea Became Salty,” for the times beg for at least grounded, surefooted beginnings—even if many find themselves wading in obscurity after a story unfolds. More »

Published on juli 6, 2010.
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Macgregor Card, Duties of an English Foreign Secretary

New York City-based poet and bibliographer Macgregor Card is taking readers along for a ride that isn’t always comforting, but neither is reality. In Duties of an English Foreign Secretary, which is the 2009 Fence Modern Poet Series winner, we might find ourselves careening between Card’s unusual humor, his penchant for flourishing outpours and confessions, and a heavy honesty reminiscent of trying to chat with a distant relative but not really reaching them despite wholehearted attempts—a kind of honesty not always accepted or even recognized. More »

Published on maj 1, 2010.
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Allison Benis White, Self-Portrait with Crayon

Winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize, Allison Benis White impresses with her ability to convince us that this could in no way be her first collection—it’s not the work of an amateur. Precise, declarative, intelligent, Benis White’s words are not limited to personal memories regarding familial connections or meditative references to Degas’s oeuvre of paintings; they also concern themselves with wisdom and self-education. These prose poems are well-constructed pieces of one’s life through the eyes of you the reader, the detective, the scientist, the player, the suffering. More »

Published on april 1, 2010.
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Laura Sims, Stranger

Stranger is Laura Sims’s second collection of poetry following her first book Practice, Restraint, which was the winner of The Alberta Prize in 2005. Sparse, spaced with deliberate intention, this collection of poems is at times airy (”—The world grows thin—”) and hopeful and at other times: heavy and melancholy but most sincere in its process. Laura Sims is highly particular regarding each line; she possesses skill and poetic prowess that stem from experience. Some poets, with continual exercise, become increasingly heightened to every word, breath and gesture. Sims also incorporates prose in a micro-doses alongside poetic verse. More »

Published on februari 1, 2010.
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Elizabeth Marie Young, Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize

Most imaginative, to the point of popping your threshold for poetic tolerance and casual comprehension, Elizabeth Marie Young’s Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize is not so interested in rhyme schemes or concise line breaks, but more with perfecting a mini-narrative flow. Each poem in this sequence is packed to the brim with almost illicit words and inscapes—a mixture of the fantastical and the quasi-theoretical. Winner of the 2009 Motherwell Prize, this poet and classicist shares her slippery creations of both dialectical and intellectual composition. Some might find themselves on a word-starved journey towards an alienating escapism or double-take. More »

Published on januari 1, 2010.
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Douglas Kearney, The Black Automaton

Selected by the poet Catherine Wagner, The Black Automaton is deserving of its title as the winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series, for it speaks (no, it blasts and shakes) both to the current events of today and the WTF maelstroms of yesterday. Do you need an ark or a battleship or a parachute or a fiery torch to end up on the other side? It couldn’t hurt. Kearney’s pages couple eloquent craft with a tremor of an unforeseeable change, for better or worse. There are different kinds of anger, and there are kinds that appear on the page. Despite the propaganda encircling this emotion, I consider Douglas Kearney’s work to be both ”beautiful and above all, useful.” More »

Published on januari 1, 2010.
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Jacob Wren, Families Are Formed Through Copulation

Some books are meant to be taken seriously, some are meant to make you take yourself seriously, and some to make you question the validity of seriousness all together. Jacob Wren’s Families Are Formed Through Copulation is all of these things. Wren’s perspective shifts with the moodiness of someone terminally affected, wounded by the unreasonable demands that our world places on us: to be a functioning member of society who gives back what one has taken, to be responsible for one’s actions, to never become angry or lash out from the weight of life’s unfairness and lies, to have ”regular,” practical goals such as having a nice-sized home, a lush fenced-in backyard overgrown with organic fruits and vegetables, an upstanding occupation, and more importantly, to have children. More »

Published on augusti 1, 2009.
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Andrea Lambert, Jet Set Desolate

Investigating a difficult time in a difficult place (California: post-millennium), Andrea Lambert’s debut novel Jet Set Desolate is a minor flashback into the unstable, patchy American mode de la vie of a fictional character named Lena Cosentino. Writing from the po-mo perspective of a lone woman in her early thirties, the now alcoholic (although nothing in comparison to Lena’s past bouts with more serious narcotics and other not-so-wise socio-sexual diversions … some worthy of attention, some blown out of proportion) grapples with the remainders of her memories and desires, her failure to assimilate to what America expects of her. Written primarily from Lena’s first-person perspective, the reader is allowed to view Lena’s Bay Area on-the-fringe, bohemian-punk existence firsthand but in retrospect. The reader is reminded of the beginnings of various popular realities that are now well-known to many in their late 20’s or early 30’s—many at-a-loss post-grads from somewhat respectable liberal arts colleges and/or art schools that haven’t exactly panned out like they promised. More »

Published on augusti 1, 2009.
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