Will Montgomery’s succinct study Short Form American Poetry: The Modernist Tradition is one of those texts that, in a quiet way, shake up a whole topic. Among its main gifts are repeated reminders — subliminal rather than overt — of just what an unlikely and unprecedented development the “short-form” poem really was and how odd it is that it should have become a particularly American phenomenon.
Photo of Steven Seidenberg (right) courtesy of Seidenberg.
Steven Seidenberg’s Anon is a textual mountebank — a term that Seidenberg defines in the collection’s lavish glossary as “a person hawker of quack medicines in public places, attracting an audience by tricks, storytelling, and jokes.”[1] It’s not common for poetry collections to have their own glossaries — and even less common for them to feature words that don’t appear anywhere in the text.
Photo of Matvei Yankelevich (right) courtesy of Yankelevich.
Dead Winter (along with Matvei Yankelevich’s chapbook From A Winter Notebook) has been culled from a long project whose intention Yankelevich writes, is “to reassemble winter’s / memory.”[1] This description is both tantalizing and ambiguous.
Photo of Susan Briante (left) courtesy of Briante.
Susan Briante’s Defacing the Monument is a hybrid creative-critical text that explores the possibilities for documentary poetics to interrupt injustice.
Detail from ‘Mezzetin’ by Antoine Watteau, ca. 1718–20, pictured also on the cover of ‘A Suite of Dances.’
Suite of Dances is composed of a series of apparently disconnected statements in verse. A slight detour can help highlight the central formal questions at work in this book. In Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary, Marjorie Perloff describes what Herman Rapaport called “negative serialization”:
