Reviews

Against apocalypse

A review of Ron Silliman's 'Revelator'

At right: “Phuket after Tsunami (2004)” by Milei Vencel; used with modification under CC Attribution-Share Alike license.

Somewhere along the way, Ron Silliman and his fellow L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets earned the reputation for being heartless.

Published by Black Widow Press as part of their Modern Poets Series, Eye of Witness: A Jerome Rothenberg Reader interweaves poems with prose work in a grand collage,[1] proffering a vivid map through the intellectual and procedural frameworks of Rothenberg’s oeuvre.

Renee Gladman and the New Narrative

Virginia Konchan

Little discourse exists today, at either pole of high literary theory or pop discourse, that narrativizes the bond between the individual writer and the reader in poetry or fiction, other than metaphors of the “literary market” as a collective purchasing power or critical arbiter of taste.

A proliferation of differences

A review of 'Troubling the Line'

Thomas Fink

In Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, the first anthology of its kind, editors TC Tolbert and Trace Peterson have included a wide diversity of aesthetic and social perspectives.

The solar vowels in our throats

A review of Meredith Stricker's 'Mistake'

Deborah Poe

Rosmarie Waldrop chose Meredith Stricker’s Mistake as the winner of the Caketrain Chapbook Competition in 2011. “Chapbook” seems a misnomer for the seventy-eight-page book, and the collection finds itself at the intersection of the most interesting work today in contemporary poetics. It is innovative without being apolitical, experimental without compromising emotional resonance, and uneasily categorized.