Reviews

'We want to live on it'

A review of 'We Used to Be Generals'

Sarah Campbell’s poems are funny, but so what? There’s no shortage of funny contemporary American poems. In fact, one could argue that a particular strain of humor has been the default setting for much American poetry, be it mainstream or avant-garde, since the poets of the New York School, tutored on Auden, shook off some of the high seriousness of Modernism mid-century. True wit is something else again and, while often funny, is not automatically so. If irony is still, despite counter-efforts, the spirit of the age, poetry of wit stands in an ironic relationship to it.

'Cross Worlds'

On 'Transcultural Poetics: An Anthology'

Patrick James Dunagan

Naropa University’s program in poetics has gained near legendary status. The annual summer sessions bring in poets from around the world to teach week long seminars, give readings, and participate in panel discussions. Founded in 1974 in honor of Jack Kerouac by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, it has long since eclipsed its early beginnings when it was generally taken quasi-seriously as a place for the devoted to study with surviving elders of the Beat generation, et al., while pursuing meditative practice (i.e., “disembodied poetics”) with varying levels of serious intent among participants.

Habitation caesurae

A review of Heather Christle's 'Heliopause'

Laura Carter

First of all, what is a heliopause? If etymology can be believed, it’s the caesura that lives in the sun, a respite from ordinary days and nights, a pause in life wearing a yellow dress, or maybe a green dress, maybe also embedded with jewels.

Pretty information

A review of Brandon Brown's 'Top 40'

Davy Knittle

Brandon Brown’s Top 40 is forty poems of forty sentences, each sequentially titled with the name of a song from America’s Top 40 with Ryan Seacrest, where the first poem’s title is the fortieth song of the countdown on September 14, 2013, and the title of the last poem is number 1.

Pop music is an ecstasy for Brown, and it has both collectivity and isolation in it. He writes:

'The succession of syndromes'

A review of erica kaufman's 'INSTANT CLASSIC'

Kathleen DelMar Miller

In the beginning, I could not face INSTANT CLASSIC directly. Too bright, I could only handle it in bits, my gaze slightly averted. From this peripheral place, kaufman’s book followed me. I carried it with me on the subway, slept with it beside the bed. I gathered what felt like relevant books and films around me. Talismanic. I kept INSTANT CLASSIC, and kaufman, in mind. And then, I could not look away.