Reviews

'Liberation in time of emergency'

On the poetics of Duncan and O'Hara

Most welcome and necessary are these two collections of new essays on the poetry of Robert Duncan and Frank O’Hara, respectively. Poets of literary imagination of the first rank, each has contributed divergent but complimentary perspectives to American poetry of the latter half of the twentieth century. Ezra Pound is daddy to them as much as Gertrude Stein is momma. Play, mirth, and wit with plenty of informal as well as formal reading and study inform the gridwork anchoring the poems and lives of these poets.

A poetry of vision

A review of 'This Constellation Is a Name' by Michael Heller

Eric Hoffman

Michael Heller right. Photo by Lawrence Schwartzwald.

Michael Heller’s This Constellation Is A Name: Collected Poems 1965–2010 is a culmination of over forty years of poetic exploration by a major voice in contemporary poetry. From his experimental poems of the 1960s to the more assured (though no less experimental) work of recent decades, Heller’s poems wrestle with all the implications of “history and the constellated night,” as he writes in “Gloss.”[1]

Typological inquiries

On Lori Anderson Moseman's 'All Steel'

Afton Wilky

Made up of three sections — “Teaching Tools,” “Labor Pools,” and “Work Cycles” — Lori Anderson Moseman’s All Steel builds a complex series of cause-and-effect-like inquiries. These inquiries are based on a trio of typological metaphors: tool (is to) genre (as) type of worker (is to) building or social space (as) month or holiday (is to) ritual.

Everything remembers equally

A review of Jennifer K. Dick's 'Circuits'

Jonathan Regier

Jennifer K. Dick’s third collection of poems, Circuits, tells us on the title page that it is a “rereading/revisiting of George Johnson’s In the Palaces of Memory,” a 1993 work of popular science. But the result is not an analytical kind of poetry.

Whose hearts are a thousand chemicals

A review of Calvin Bedient's 'The Multiple'

Drew Dillhunt

Calvin Bedient’s fourth full-length volume of poetry, The Multiple, realizes the lines of multiplicity initiated by his previous three collections (Candy Necklace, 1997; The Violence of Morning, 2002; and Days of Unwilling, 2008). These earlier collections suggest the plurality of experience by gathering and juxtaposing snapshots of perspective to insinuate the whole. The Multiple takes this approach a step further by explicitly pointing its particular sampling of reality’s permutations toward the infinite outline of the unexcavated majority. The poems of The Multiple are as interested in communicating the negative space of what can’t be captured as they are in the positive space of what can. Bedient’s unwavering fix on the subjectivity of everything unleashes a “huffing accordion commotion” whose implied poetic production spreads well beyond the constraints of the physical book that delivers them. “Becoming’s a broken idea,” these poems insist (16).