Catherine Wagner, My New Job

A public document and a relaxed collection of intimate poetry fusing arguments, personal writing exercises, confusions, clarifications and candid declarations, Catherine Wagner’s My New Job wears many faces: a seductive smile, a snide sideways glare, a big-toothed grin, a downward glance, an open-jawed stare:

Just in every rathole, just trying to learn everything at once
I was learning everything at once

The poet–sometimes sexual and raw, occasionally impotent and anti-social–shares her moods without regret. Feelings are recognized, made fun of, accepted and even resented. Bittersweet yet rich, this job is one that is fulfilling and yet doesn’t bring on the guilt that comes with eating too much or talking out of turn. More »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

James Shea, Star in the Eye

Star in the Eye is true to itself and to the heavier emotions that stem from awkwardness, transition, rejection, resignation, lost time and memory. Recent winner of The Fence Modern Poets Series, it is easy to understand why this one was chosen among its stealthy competition. James Shea’s thoughts are carefully constructed so that they become valuable to anyone, not just devoted poetry followers or even those who craft words themselves. Certain lines are so effectual and familiar—especially to those who question every iota, including their own flecks in and of the world—that Shea lets them stand alone: “Here, place me wherever.” Perhaps more guarded than their surrounding clusters, perhaps not, lines such as this one press the reader to denounce previous conclusions or reject the roles of others around them. Or: maybe this line refers to the collective sentiment of our spent generation… taking whatever job or role we can. There’s little room to be picky in an era similar to last century’s stifling Depression; there’s little room left after excessive technological spews, media binges, flagrant consumerism. More »

Aaron Kunin, The Mandarin

The prospect of writing an innovative novel could be a contemporary poet’s nightmare, for who wants to be confined by mainstream devices of the conventional narrative, and how does a poet turned novelist avoid the blunders of monotony (or as Kunin writes on pg. 28, “a lifetime of needless repetitions”)? At best, how does this novel pursue a previously overlooked approach? Aaron Kunin’s first novel The Mandarin is hardly coy in dissecting the heavy sentiments associated with such a pursuit. The lines between the writer and the novel’s panoply of characters, between the reader and the read and among the novel’s personalities (both human and their inanimate counterparts—e.g. a TV set, toenail clippings, umbrella, telephone, ad nauseam) are brimming with pointed opinions, intellect and desire—they are infinitely built, demolished, rebuilt and tinkered with. The Mandarin requires the strictest attention; its pace is quick, odd and askew but careful not to exhaust. One could almost declare that Kunin’s book, along with being a disappointed jester of our current political and spiritual state, is a questionably harmless enemy of the predictable and linear. More »