From left to right: the cover of “cue,” Siwar Masannat.
Siwar Masannat is a Jordanian writer, poet, educator, and editor currently based in Milwaukee. cue,Masannat’s second book of poetry, emerges from her engagement with Akram Zaatari’s project Hashem El Madani: Studio Practices, which brought El Madani’s compelling photographs of community members in Saida, Lebanon, to a global audience.
cue Siwar Masannat University of Georgia Press 2024, 82 pages, $19.95, ISBN 9780820365978
From left to right: the cover of “Indigo Angel,” Jeanne Hueving (photo by Marc Studer).
The well-worn apothegm text, texture, textile gets reversed in Jeanne Heuving’s remarkable new book, Indigo Angel, which is comprised of three long poems that, read as one, become something greater, much in the way the ecology of a place gives rise to a human drama, our civilization’s history unfolding within a natural order.
Indigo Angel Jeanne Heuving Black Square Editions, 2023, 220 pages, ISBN 979–8–986036–91–5
The covers of “Further Adventures” and “To Go Into the Words” by Norman Finkelstein.
The lot of the committed poet-critic is a tricky one; the hyphen can be precarious. For some of the greatest dual practitioners in the language — I’m thinking here of Dr. Johnson, Coleridge, William Empson, Laura Riding — prose sooner or later seems to become the “easier” medium, the poetry either slowing down considerably, drying up completely, or being turned away from consciously.
Further Adventures Norman Finkelstein Dos Madres Press 2023, 108 pages, paperback $23 ISBN 9781953252821
To Go Into the Words Norman Finkelstein University of Michigan Press 2023, 222 pages, paperback $34.95 ISBN 9780472039418
In a chapter on Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger (1975) in his most recent critical monograph, Michael Golston proposes to treat the enigmatic figure of Sllab as “pure science fiction,” an approach that, so far as he knows, “has not been taken before.” A pertinent question would be, “Why not?” — for Dorn made no secret of Sllab’s genesis in Stanley Kubrick’s “main deific principle” in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), “the stone with the music.” Do critics of avant-garde poetry tend to shy away from science fiction?
The Science Fiction of Poetics and the Avant-Garde Imagination Michael Golston The University of Alabama Press, 2024, 243 pages, $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-6100-6; E-ISBN 978-0-8173-9468-4
Claire DeVoogd is a multifarious poet based in Brooklyn. Via is her first book. Writing more than eight centuries after the legendary Breton poet based at the English court, Marie de France, DeVoogd addresses her literary ancestor casually and intimately, like a familiar spirit.
Via Claire DeVoogd Winter Editions, 2023, 136 pages, $20.00, ISBN 978-1-959708-04-9
“What were the dead like? What sort of people are we living with now? Why are we here? What are we going to do? Let’s try putting it in another way.”
