Forklift, Ohio #18
by Cara Benson

Rare is the journal that works as a true collection of corresponding and communicating poems, each piece leading into the next. Even rarer is the one with kitchen tips. Simultaneously cheeky, vulnerable, funny, ominous, and lyrically toying with what is or is not “accessible,” Forklift, Ohio makes me love poetry again. It even comes with postcards.

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Jenny Boully's The Book of Beginnings and Endings
Two Reviews: Kristina Marie Darling & Jac Jemc

Boully skillfully manipulates her audience’s expectations of form and genre, opening in medias res and closing as further questions surface in the minds of her readers. Filled with works of prose that masquerade as novels, biographies, notebooks, and literary criticism, The Book of Beginnings and Endings takes on a range of voices, with lyricism and originality throughout. [ READ MORE ]

Mark Wallace's Walking Dreams
by Cynthia Reeser

Wallace doesn’t just tell an interesting story––he tells it in an interesting way, finding new and unexpected methods of presenting the tales. His characters are often pensive creatures who risk being drowned out by the city, which is always “full and alive,” and where “loneliness is only an impression carved out of the hard wood of a world in motion.” [ READ MORE ]

Amy King's Kiss Me with the Mouth of Your Country
by Caroline Wilkinson

Kiss Me with the Mouth of Your Country is a potent work not only artistically but politically, more so than King’s earlier poetry. Instead of loaded words, we get moments that bring us into a body where the borders shift. In this “country,” the “I” and “you” suddenly change because the line between the two keeps moving. The borders here are insecure . . .

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Brian Kim Stefans' What is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers
by C St Perez

Stefans’s poetry, extended through the axis of punk, offers new possibilities for a “punk-avant” rebellion.

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Joyelle McSweeney's Flet
by Nick Bredie

If Flet is the dreamscape of 21st century America, its grimly beautiful portent is that the dream can only go deeper, crushing language and the individual under its pressure. There is no waking up.

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Melissa Buzzeo's What Began Us
by M. Perel

In What Began Us, Melissa Buzzeo writes the space of absence, the space of the irretrievable love, thing, memory that marks its presence by its elusive nature. As if she is carving a body out of time, as if a body can be birthed by the space it leaves behind, Buzzeo uses language like small tools that carve up this flesh, or monument to a past no longer retrievable. . . . [READ MORE]

Matthea Harvey's Modern Life
by Nan Burton

Matthea Harvey has created a universe within the fissures. Modern Life is a text that bears witness to that which exceeds historical experience — a beautiful yet apocalyptic mirror of our enigmatic present.

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Scott Inguito's lection
by Craig Santos Perez

Extrusion, a process used to create objects of a fixed cross-sectional profile, draws material (such as metals, polymers, ceramics, and food) through a die of desired shape. . . .

The danger (for the reader) in any work of conceptual art occurs when the idea becomes more interesting than the poetry. More often than not, a conceptual poet will draw the poetry through the Idea without much thought to the poetry of the Idea. Fortunately, Inguito is not one of those artists. [READ MORE]

Dan Chelotti's The Eights
by Alexis M. Smith

Like Eliot's Quartets, Chelotti's The Eights poses questions about how to exist in the absence of what was, and how to negotiate the things that only temporarily persist—and skeptically offers language as a proxy for understanding. [READ MORE]

Joshua Marie Wilkinson's Lug Your Careless Body
out of the Careful Dusk
by Alexis M. Smith

That liminal space through which Wilkinson’s poems move—the dusk out of which we must haul meaning—lies somewhere between the desire to hide and the desire to be found. The obscurity of darkness is attractive, but the desire to reveal and be revealed is stronger. The fragments of Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk reveal themselves, moment by moment, luring us into an understanding that goes beyond explication, or even resolution. [READ MORE]

Mark Nowak's ¡Workers of the Word, Unite and Fight!
by Caroline Wilkinson

[Nowak] reveals the ambitious breadth of his focus when he sets out to define the last term in his title: “Neoliberalism, Collective Action, and the American MFA Industry.” He tells us that “the American MFA industry” is a “multimillion-dollar conglomeration of state and private enterprises.” This conglomeration includes publications and groups that encourage people to get degrees in creative writing. Poets and Writers magazine is named along with the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. [READ MORE]

James Wagner's Trilce
by Nick Bredie

Instead of trying to bottle this chaos by translating for "meaning,"’ Wagner proceeds to "translate" Vallejo homophonically. He picks an English word close in sound to Vallejo’s bastard Spanish and proceeds from there (skillfully avoiding the possibility of real gibberish). The results are often magnificent . . . [READ MORE]

Calamari Press & Text/Image
by Selah Saterstrom

I am reminded that words might be erased/scraped hollow of utilitarian impacted meat in order to mean. We scrape, break, and erase. The marks of our gestures are visible, not separate events from writing, but a form of writing. So that we might speak the languages of the dead and/or the “over there” languages of the heart. Or rather: try for them to speak us. [READ MORE]

Brigitte Byrd's The Fence Above the Sea
by Alexis M. Smith

The act of writing is often a process of remembering, of starting in solitude and calling back a time and a place. Byrd brilliantly portrays the artist seeking out memory and making a language of it, making a pattern and narrative of the mind’s accumulations.[READ MORE]

Lillias Bever's Bellini in Istanbul
by Alexis M. Smith

When our great civilization has fallen, we can only hope that our remnants are treated with the grace and awe afforded the artifacts here.[READ MORE]

Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s Suspension of a Secret
in Abandoned Rooms
by Alexis M. Smith

Genealogy is more than a catalog of influences and obsessions; as Wilkinson demonstrates throughout these poems, it is about existing in the shared, haunted spaces in which creative desire is born—what genes are to the family tree. These are the “rooms” Wilkinson visits and invokes—dark places full of strange private histories and shameful communal ones—places in which “every day the war can’t fathom itself." [READ MORE]

Juliana Spahr's this connection of everyone with lungs
by Alexis M. Smith

Reading this connection of everyone with lungs, now, in a period politicians and pundits constantly refer to as “post-war,” is both heartbreaking and, somehow, comforting. Heartbreaking because we are still, years later, powerless and bereft, grappling with losses half a world away, trying to make sense of them in a country intent on keeping its distance. And comforting because Spahr has written a book that will doubtless be read for as long as humans exist, to understand what the hell happened in the early part of the twenty-first century. [READ MORE]

Ethan Paquin's The Violence
by Alexis M. Smith

[In The Violence,] the natural world and its processes are a mirror for the vast internal spaces ravaged and rebuilt by human relationships. “Rain/plies onward in restless sleep, re-gathering over the lakes and all,/and so do we. And so it goes with all these gone places, now silences/made salient by hard roads not so interested in us at all.” The “gone places” and “silences” mark the changes, the internal and external losses, and the grief for those losses. What makes this poem, and all of The Violence, engaging is Paquin’s ability to evoke those gone places.[READ MORE]

Wendy S. Walters's Birds of Los Angeles
by Alexis M. Smith

The twenty-three poems in this collection are like the rare birds, monsters, and carnivorous flowers Walters evokes: they are deceptively small; curiously strange; and, sometimes, vicious.[READ MORE]

Beth Anderson's Overboard
by Tim Roberts

...both the landscape of disaster and a potential site of redemption. The poet would send us a message from either or both of these locales, and that message or story is driven constantly by loss. “The address chosen as terra firma // for the first telegram turned out not / to be the first. Loss permeates the story’s / texture. Over time it has been crushed // into a jagged state of indecision, part / of learning when to stop for water and // which signs to bypass. [READ MORE]

Aimee Bender's Willful Creatures
by Alexis M. Smith

What becomes increasingly obvious to me as I read more of Bender’s work is that surrealism is not the active trope. It is the common descriptor because the surreal elements of Bender’s work demand attention in a way that her solid similes and rhythmic cadences don’t. Even the sex (prevalent and protected by a sort of pre-Freudian veneer) doesn’t make it to reviews the way the surrealism does, despite the charming way pants fall open with a sigh (“Ironhead”), or the way the mutants (the key-fingered boy in “The Leading Man,”) make great lovers, or the way female-female interactions are sometimes violent and/or sexually charged (“Off” and “Debbieland”). [READ MORE]

Norman Lock's A History of the Imagination
by Amy Havel

Like other of the better “experimental” fictions, this novel forces the reader to negotiate between reading the text and reading around, in between, and under the text, analyzing what Lock’s translating along with what he’s leaving open. Lock, however, plays even upon this presumption; toward the middle of the novel, we are transported to the City of Radiant Objects, where “things are free of the obligation to signify.” Funny, yes, and the reader’s reaction to reading this is even funnier (excellent, what a relief, now I can just read and enjoy the fun). [READ MORE]

Heidi Lynn Staples' Guess Can Gallop
by Deanne Lundin

...contemporary poetry seethes with conundrum and predicament, with the impossibilities of being, even as we are, well—as we are. When poetry manages to communicate that as awe rather than simply angst, I am especially grateful.

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Selah Saterstrom's The Pink Institution
by Julianna Spallholz

In Saterstrom’s first novel, a surreal southern gentility dangles from each delicately placed word. Suspiciously polite attention laces every deftly crafted phrase. Around each relentless image, gracious regard grows like a voracious weed, and layers of charm and hospitality flake away like dead skin to reveal what lives behind, beneath and within four generations of a Mississippi family. What lives there is made of heat, history, ghosts, and gin, and seems to emerge by a sort of black magic from an orchestration of image, sound and empty space. [READ MORE]

from Tarpaulin Sky V4n2 Fall/Winter 06/07
with Selah Saterstrom

Selah Saterstrom
with Christian Peet

"After atrocities forms emerge, often called avant-garde forms. Looking at avant-garde as a literal translation, these forms may be “forward looking” but they feel more to me like forms of present moment witness. How does one speak after a violence that literally reconfigures the cellular structure of things, that, in its erasure, records the shadow of what is no longer present? Out of necessity forms arise to speak a language that must also speak these losses and transfigurations." [READ MORE]

Juliana Spahr
with Michael Boyko

"I like poetry because it helps me think. It helps me resort data. It lets me list things and then think about the shape of the list. I am not sure I can make poetry do much more than this. I don't trust poetry when it tells me what to do without resorting the way I see things first." [READ MORE]

Jonathan Skinner & Jane Sprague
with Michael Boyko

"The pulp and paper industry is the 3rd most polluting industry in North America. When I checked Environmental Defense for point-source pollution in the Buffalo area [where ecopoetics is published], printers came up among the biggest culprits.” [READ MORE]

Rebecca Brown
with Julianna Spalholz

"...that Cabin story. That is material I have had kicking around in me for years but never knew how to approach it. But when I had her portrait – like an externalized, “other-ized” image of myself/my character – I could approach the material. It was like, because her images were there, my voices had something to hold on to, to grab for. I do hope I have finally exorcised that material. But I am afraid it is still in me. As the poet David McAleavey says, 'unrepeatable events inhere in us.'" [READ MORE]

Nancy Kiefer
with Julianna Spallholz

"I’d been going to my studio for a couple of weeks, looking for a way to be moved, yet kind of scared to begin. I had a large canvas on the wall, very white and pristine. Seemed too overwhelming. I said some meditative prayers, then proceeded to paint a large head of a baby straight on the canvas with a brush. When I finished, this baby looked at me and I looked back. We had this connection, even though, or probably because, it was a creepy baby, part saint and part adult, with compassionate eyes but a rather scheming mouth." [READ MORE]