forty-two: april 2005

4.30.2005 saturday
 Victims by Travis Jeppesen Victims (Akashic Books) is about the final days of a religious cult called The Overcomers. Travis Jeppesen has penned an episodic narrative featuring a quirky, sympathetic group of characters ensconced in a novel of melodic genius—a right cracker of a tome!
-Mark
 4.29.2005 friday
 Little Fugue: A Novel by Robert Anderson This overblown, incomprehensible novel features Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Hughes’s lover Assia Wevill, and the book’s own author (what?!) as characters. The story is told in voices, with Wevill’s being the most interesting. Want a Plath novel? Read Kate Moses’s Wintering instead.
-Becky
 4.28.2005 thursday
 Tarantella by Rebecca Loudon http://www.ravennapress.com/books/tarantella.html When Rebecca Loudon trisects the tarantella in 'The Bite', 'The Dance' and 'The Cure', juice pours out. Disturbingly, one never knows whether it's from flesh or fruit. Consider: 'Julia plucked out / the blood ripe strawberries, / spun them on her tongue'.
-Ivy
 4.27.2005 wednesday
 Uproar: Antiphonies to Psalms by Brooks Haxton Laidback, if formally distinct, riffs on the psalms. Intially strikes the reader as treading somewhere between humor and blasphemy, but Haxton is actually quite sincere and, in making (too) familiar sacred texts so ordinary, achieves some small measure of dignity and grace.
-Timothy
 4.26.2005 tuesday
 Unnecessary Roughness by Shin Yu Pai http://www.lulu.com/content/103810 Shin Yu Pai investigates the ugly side of sport that verbally punishes the weak, through poetry that reveals itself to be a hybrid child of wordplay and ball-play. Her language makes tense leaps, muscled thighs angled/poised between ballet flight and rugby tackle.
-Ivy
 4.25.2005 monday
 My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe Susan Howe, you make me want to be a better reader. You are lightning-quick and condensed into the exact inch of brilliance, yet you also sing it. And I know I don’t always appreciate you like I should. Be patient with me.
-Jen
 4.24.2005 sunday
 The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy D.H. Lawrence wrote that the hero of this novel is the land itself; certainly, when coupled with the weather, it's the most interesting thing around. The tragedy here seems authorially forced and the local colour is just plain odd. Ripping fun nonetheless.
-Timothy
 4.23.2005 saturday
 Aporias by Jacques Derrida, Trans. by Thomas Dutoit Derrida delimits death. My margin notes are filled with immediately incomprehensible notes like: "death of the other is first in 'my death,'" but most of them are smudged into illegibility anyways. I liked this quite a bit, but I don't remember why.
-Timothy
 4.20.2005 wednesday
 The Pines, Volume One by Brandon Shimoda and Phil Cordelli Palm-sized pine-colored book moves along faultlines: those of Southern California and between two writers. Redolent of citrus, labor, architecture, freeway wastelands, and cardsharks, the poem(s) work by way of imagistic collide and syntactic mechanization: moving parts. "Check out the website."
-Erika
 4.19.2005 tuesday
 Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky 1931-1970 edited by Jenny Penberthy I guess it’s no surprise that reading one side of a correspondence feels a little one-sided. Highly edited (paragraphs cuts out) and consciously archived (meta discussions of) by Niedecker and Zukofsky, these letters still seem to hold secrets: about poetry-making, floodwaters, loneliness.
-Jen
 4.18.2005 monday
 The Room Lit by Roses: A Journal of Pregnancy and Birth by Carole Maso As much about “journal” as “pregnancy and birth” – what happens when we break into this moment to write it, how do narrations mediate and carryover and premeditate and forecast and insist, how do you have a baby without becoming a total breeder.
-Jen
 4.13.2005 wednesday
 The Sleep That Changed Everything by Lee Ann Brown Sleep's interested in externally given forms (villanelles, acrostics, blues) and constantly acknowledges its own indebtedness to forepoets like Hejinian and Mayer. In that light, its frequently bloated pages, begging for edits, may be justified. Still, they irritate. Brown's book Polyverse is shaplier.
-Erika
 4.6.2005 wednesday
 The Republic of Love by Carol Shields Shields self-consciously writes a contemporary adult love story or, more accurately, the story of two adults who fall in love despite rejecting the very concept of it. Cozy but also challenging, it forces the reader to reassess the value of narrative itself.
-Tim
 4.1.2005 friday
 L’Abbe C by Georges Bataille The allegorical (and ultimately peripheral) narrative concerns twin brothers– a priest and a libertine. But Bataille’s real attention is paid to his usual compulsions: taboo/transgression, orgy/sacrifice, love/betrayal. Though his kinky brilliance illuminates key passages, the whole is somewhat uneven.
-Dan






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