forty-two: january 2006

1.20.2006 friday
 Muffler by Clay Matthews (H_NGM_N Chapbook Series) As title predicts: automotive consciousness, dark/tight worry. Even funny moments have hands over their mouths, too secure for comfort. "Every time I sit on a motorcycle I know before/ I crank the motor something terrible is going to happen." Neighborhood familiar, seer.
-Jen
 1.19.2006 thursday
 My Kafka Century by Arielle Greenberg (Action Books) Narrative intuition that propels the line is both slyly ancient and sincerely modern, both man-made and organic: (pop?/!) culture wandering in the forest. A great success of a greater embrace and running off-kilter for answers. "I hid from God and was found."
-Jen
 1.18.2006 wednesday
 An Educated Heart by Mairead Byrne (Palm Press 2005) Her found poems carry their charge – the energy of the previous owner, the marked print of the new. About war, about violence, about money and loss and distance – the finder asks what to do with these things that we find? Make sense.
-Jen
 1.17.2006 tuesday
 Yonnondio: From The Thirties by Tille Olson Incompletely written when Olson was nineteen and reorganized (but not rewritten or added to) when she was nearly sixty – story of one family's Depression migration from coal-mines to slaughterhouse slums. Sometimes (especially early) the pitifulness is overblown, but fragmentation provokes. What happened?
-Jen
 1.16.2006 monday
 Bramble by Joseph Massey (Hot Whiskey Press, 2005) Beautiful book-art by HWP. More keen to sense and opened-out than Massey's previous chapbook – these little poems grow into themselves, feel strongest in the second half when meaning is not put upon but escalates, when song has developed. Joe's lyric is warbling.
-Jen
 1.15.2006 sunday
 Madeleine is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum A chain of prose blocks that grow into a story in which reality is the other thing, slips in and out of concsiousness. The format is useful for cultivating elements of both narrative and lyric: a stilled moment moves around the corner.
-Jen
 1.14.2006 saturday
 The Winchester Monologues by Rachel Moritz (New Michigan Press 2005) Refers to Sarah Winchester and the strange home she built as apology for the Winchester rifle. The shapes of these poems are also odd and determined, inward yet exclamatory. Part II becomes metaphysical when the home becomes a tourist site, put upon.
-Jen
 1.13.2006 friday
 A Gringo Like Me by Jennifer L. Knox (Soft Skull Press 2005) Funny like a heart attack. "We haven’t always lived in the trees, kitty-" You can watch these monologues develop on the page and still be surprised at their arrival, what turn-of-phrase makes. "We peered out the gate, watched the town dropping dead."
-Jen
 1.12.2006 thursday
 Among Other Things: Poems and Proposals by Zach Barocas (The Cultural Society 2005) Something old made new. These poems remember Creeley in theme and tone but rarely in line -- like rereading old letters in "Arrivals," lines circle, relish, dwell, play at being both masculine and feminine, suggesting another way in both theme and shape.
-Jen
 1.11.2006 wednesday
 Tarantella by Rebecca Loudon (Ravenna Press 2004) The cure is so much bigger than its cause. Written in three parts, instead of resolve you go deeper, realize that cure isn’t going backwards, full-circle, or return. These poems are terrifying mouthfuls, herky-jerky processions, adamant exclamations – all in the best way.
-Jen
 1.10.2006 tuesday
 Ghost Dance by Carole Maso (North Point Press, 1986) Stills from Vanessa's life flash before your eyes. Madly-melancholic, poetic mother. Father accounting composers. Brother the conservationist. Grand Central Station, ominous birds, Indian curses, narcoleptic roommates, s&m, immigrant grandparents, French pop stars, icy fjords. In memory of.
-Roxanne Carter
 1.9.2006 monday
 A Quiet Life by Kenzaburo Oe The narrator, a 20-year-old woman, is self-conscious of language, a curious circumstance in a translated novel. Things happen inside quotation marks. As Ma-chan cares for her brain-damaged older brother, deciphers symbolism, and visits sexual deviants in their homes, you want to help.
-Jen
 1.8.2006 sunday
 The Cave by Jose Saramago A potter and his daughter and son-in-law begin to understand the decisions they make, begin to understand their dreams, in a village that’s stuck in and out of time. Conversations are the bones that uphold hours, weeks, years. A self-conscious language elaborates.
-Jen
 1.7.2006 saturday
 field stone by Catherine Kasper These stones make up undulating bridges, the tension between you and you, you and we, we and color. These poems are ekphrasis and observances—of foreign places, other people, ways of being. These languages are the languages that lie between each other.
-Jen
 1.6.2006 friday
 Learning the Language by Kate Greenstreet Crawling into the details of maps, crawling in and out of sick beds. This comes from a low-to-the-earth and specific perspective, an opening outside of which learning the language seems like resigning, a consolation prize. “We have a little bit of choice.”
-Jen
 1.5.2006 thursday
 The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem The language of the first part of the book, the childhood, entrances and experiences, so much that you have to finish although the later parts of the book, another type of rationalizing narrator, seem to give and say less, reductive like adults.
-Jen
 1.4.2006 wednesday
 Decreation by Anne Carson (Knopf, 2005)
ann.
Abbr of annals
Abbr of annual
Abbr of annuity
car n
road vehicle
passenger-carrying part of an airship
elevator’s box-shaped container
chariot
son et lumière n
spectacle that combines dramatic lighting effects with music
-Peter Jay Shippy
 1.3.2006 tuesday
 Shadows of Houses by H.L. Hix (Etruscan Press, 2005) Hix’s book contains two radiant poems, “The God of Restlessness” and “The God of Window Screens and Honeysuckle.” The latter is a gorgeous 52-sonnet sequence quipuing a year of quotidian quodlibets. The former is a mind-blowing liturgy, a 3-liter opus.
-Peter Jay Shippy
 1.2.2006 monday
 The New York Poets II edited by Mark Ford and Trevor Winkfield (Carcanet Press, 2006) Ford’s The New York Poets Rushmored the founding 4’s fabulist school. Here, 1st gens: Guest, Elmslie, Matthews smooch 2nd gens: Berrigan, Ceravolo, and Mayer. Delightful slices from eleven who, as Padgett wrote, “gotta schlep down to the bodega for some chow mein.”
-Peter Jay Shippy
 1.1.2006 sunday
 Pasolini Poems by Stacy Szymaszek (Cy Press, 2005) Enrichment of a single life happening amidst communal throng. Kickings cruise fleshymat-erial, dead-on and real. Reading human-ed. Feel the "terrace" "buses" "thousands of kitchens" – "the heat / of ideas." Publicly public poems. Chiseled from rock face and technically divine. Cheers boulevards. Toast the concrete!
-Jon Leon






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