On Jeremy Sigler’s Crackpot. . .
These really change my definition of poetry. A little bit. If it was all sound – more or less, yet you walked away from that limitation at some point – maybe the end. The end just stands there sorta. You know what I mean by sound is rhyme. Yeah kind of rhyme. And then there’s some sentiment. These poems are not so much sexy but full of love I think. In fact that might be what the rhyming’s all about. The safety of love – perhaps. Whatever it is driving this it’s more than an idea and it’s not messy at all, or smug. It’s some new definition of poetry. It doesn’t rhyme with family but it’s about that long and that complete. And open, finally. I think Gertrude Stein. But not too much. You’ll see what I mean if you read this book.
On Rachel Levitsky’s Neighbor. . .
Neighbor is a sweet saga of disconnection. A collectivity of loss . . .
On Ryan Adams’s Infinity Blues. . .
This is much better than reading a friend’s journal. It’s more like watching somebody you love in the bathtub talking to himself. You’re like, wow, he’s even good at taking a bath. After reading Infinity Blues (which I think is a great title), I give Ryan Adams the best compliment I ever got – and the only reason for reading anyone’s poetry. Ryan, I really like your mind.”
On Zoe Whittall’s The Emily Valentine Poems. . .
This reminds me that I would like to know everything about this person.
On Nona Caspers’s Little Book of Days. . .
I like how she falls through the present into prehistory (of this or that specific thing) in a blink. Supported by the rhythm of the claws of love, a hand on the back of your head, the warmth inside of coldness of the daily fading world—an avalanche of quiet risk-taking, this book sings.
On Greg Fuchs’s Metropolitan Transit. . .
greg
congrats for epigraphing your book w audre lorde. You fucking man, I love you. This is extremely crowded work. I probably want to “cover” his book. His poetry ought to be recorded – with xylophone. He percussively uses good verbs: “penetrated, petted, perused.” He’s persuasive. It’s news as it ought to arrive. If I were to call these poems fake weather reports what would I mean by the word fake. . . Greg’s very nostalgic or is he just using the media sweetly as a kind of distinction. To be here and be here again
to say we are here
Not just history
treaties, appropriation, bills”
On Vanessa Place’s La Medusa. . .
Vanessa Place’s La Medusa is a novel of a million brilliant suggestions about the mind and time and us. What seems impossible is that she is pulling ‘it’ off in this impressive tome that moves like traffic when you have gotten it impossibly incredibly right. No wrong moves here. We get home fast.”
On Peggy Munson’s Origami Striptease. . .
This is sleazily insidious writing constructed as if you are already in it, I mean, smothered in sex and sticky frosty and the close proximity of death. I really admire Peggy Munson’s Origami Striptease. It’s a good, dirty book. “
On My Diva/65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them
edited by Michael Montlack. . .
A completely fascinating and lovely book. In every case the diva is a kind of saint – for her suffering, for the emotional warble in her voice, as she sang, as she spoke those classic lines. It’s hard to miss the dovetailing of the gay male writer’s psyche and the voluptuous (much more than her body) voice of the diva. She shines her light on the way. Man, does she ever.
On Michelle Tea’s Valencia. . .
Michelle Tea’s second book is really brave. If you want to know how dangerous and great and awful it is to be a girl you’ll scarf Valencia right up. There’s so much colliding and ‘sharing.’ I mean in the good way – sharing bodies, drugs, stories and clothes. The street today is full of girls if you haven’t noticed.”
On Ana Bozicevic’s Stars of the Night Commute. . .
Ana Bozicevic’s work is sort of animist – it’s either about silence or the racket of the world. How does she do it? Clicks the switch to say its silent & it’s happening then on a distant tiny stage. She’s muttering, and then it’s a story and a very good one. I mean in poetry at some point you don’t know what the writer means. In Ana’s work I watch “it” (the meaning) vanish (all the time) & I trust it.
On Maggie Nelson’s Jane. . .
A deep, dark, female masterpiece.
On Ellyn Maybe’s The Cowardice of Amnesia. . .
Ellyn Maybe is the best poet on her side of the country.
On Camille Roy’s Cold Heaven. . .
Not a play, but an exploding poem for two bodies by a bright new writer from the West Coast, Camille Roy.
On Ali Liebegott’s the beautifully worthless. . .
Ali Liebegott’s the beautifully worthless is an outrageous act of kindness.
On Catherine Wagner’s My New Job. . .
Catherine Wagner’s “New Job” might be the last great book of the oughts. Part of its delight is that it is not constant. Its eyelid adjusts and flutters throughout. It’s three books at least: fuzzy portraiture of energy and thought like early moderns: Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keefe – and even like Pound, in Wagner’s familial way of tugging at language. It’s also a bit Don Juan (as in Castaneda). It’s a new age book: searching, awkward and useful too – a momentary sex manual for girls—then a dirty adult notebook. My New Job is physical. A shucking work. One picks up some spin on Sylvia Plath but what I truly felt was Frankenstein. My New Job is tinkering with life. I found myself imagining Wagner wondering what else Plath might have done—not instead of killing herself but what if she just wrote something different. Frankenstein kept Mary Shelley alive for a very long time while Ariel simply pointed to Plath’s own demise. In My New Job “The women step out, the men go in” and the edifice C. Wagner’s made seems an increasingly wider and wider kind of turning—colossal and somatic—through her own body & the bodies of others. Cathy’s Job is a joyous multiple. It’s a lift.
On Julie Carr’s Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines. . .
As a reader I feel included a lot in Julie Carr’s hard and beautiful book. I can pretty much hear its author speak—a whispering that enables us into its world. . . a masterfully sutured journey, painfully useful. Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines is a book I know I will return to. And urge it on my friends who have lives too and write in them.
On Christine Hou’s Accumulations. . .
nice sweep! the spine of her poems takes either side by surprise a wide canny voice
in conversation really such a good book it seems it could fade get dark
do anything it wants
On Gerrit Henry’s Time of the Night. . .
Reading Gerrit Henry’s definitive collection of poems you slam up against some big contradictions fast. Many of the poems here exhibit the glitzy ease, high art, smart remarks and chattiness that commonly gets associated with New York school writing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there’s so much else – poems jumping around - alternately obscure, wise, goofy, trippy and romantic. And hard and sad, too. It’s such a rich cascade of viewpoints as a collection that this volume can be hard going for a reader in spots. I mean if you wanted one kind of a ride. But as you near the end, especially having read the poem that to me is his masterpiece: “Program”, how Henry’s contradictions operate now becomes clear. Each statement stands so tremulously, because what’s ultimately questionable to Henry is just “being” itself. What’s he’s done is both astonishing and bold. This is a whole collection of poems written by Hamlet.
On Laurie Weeks’s Zipper Mouth. . .
Zipper Mouth is a short tome of infintesimal reach, a tiny star to light the land.
Huh. Laurie Weeks is one of those writers whose reputation is pure buzz, like every bit she puts out (and Weeks is a most delicate and cautiously productive author, kicking us a story of absurd greatness every few years – more we scream like hungry children, more with our reading bowls held out.) almost immediately becomes genetic material of a body politic. She’s like an avatar of the known. All her vile and delicious prose indicates directions, connections and patterns you’ve probably already been moving along but no one had used those exact networks before as apparatus to write fiction. Like as if that big monster in “Alien” were a sentence. Or a paragraph. A recurring one. Weeks is an architect of the strange and quivering interrelations of the world and plainly uses them, like how rooms in a big house are said to “communicate.” Zipper Mouth, the long-awaited, predicted book, is like a song we shall continue to meet each other through. Yeah that’s what I mean, this book is a drug and a rug, a magic carpet for a group that’s growing, and on it we get a very good and even paradigm-shifting ride. A going and a knowing. How does she do this by the way? Attitude, word choice, erudition, humor, and I will say of course that there is a blatantly female thing, and she writing right on it, with it where the most edgy and savvy and witty human is also the subaltern. Zipper Mouth is a glittering and gruesome and unforgettable poem cause it’s a pain that we know.
On Sara Marcus’s Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution
“Hey girlfriend,” Kathleen was singing. “I got a proposition.” The proposition wasn’t that you would go back to her room, alone, it was that you would come out into the common space with her and all the rest of the girls. Sara Marcus’s Girls in Front is a great & true & real history.Thank, god. At last. If you teach make it get read in your school. If you don’t, do it anyway.