From left to right: Alison C. Rollins’ book “Black Bell” and Sheila Carter-Jones’ book “Every Hard Sweetness”
“Documentary poetics is often lauded for its ability to articulate social injustices and advocate for civil rights,” writes award-winning poet Craig Santos Perez.[1] Two poetry collections published last year harness this ability and mine the African American archive to shine a light on evidence of past injustices in the hopes of a better future.
Black Bell Alison C. Rollins Copper Canyon Press 2024, 136 pages, $22.00, ISBN 9781556597008
Every Hard Sweetness Sheila Carter-Jones BOA Editions 2024, 134 pages, $19.00, ISBN 9781960145123
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
