The Hairpin Tax
David Appelbaum
Codhill Press, 2010, $10
SUNY New Paltz professor Appelbaum follows his densely textured, Patersonian Nieuw Pfalz and oracular Window With Four Panes with a suite of brief, often cryptic poems constructed in short lines and stanzas (“inmates outlive”; “come clean, void”). Typeset in a deceptively airy font, these intricate “poems of haste” baffle and fascinate. —NS

L.S. Asekoff
Triquarterly/Northwestern University Press, 2010, $15.95
“A blue-eyed Dresden doll” birthed from a “once-shattered pelvis” begins Asekoff’s third collection, The Gate of Horn. Homer’s spirit portal, through which “winged messengers” relate “the avant-garde miracle of everyday life” ends it. A dazzling array of personae offer tragicomic tales in language surreally beautiful, crudely vernacular, or intellectually probing. “Listen,” advises an immigrant woman, “this island is full of voices/they talk & talk/….They stand in pools of light of time.” Yes, listen, as Asekoff works his literary, linguistic magic. —LG

Jumping Out of My Skin: Poems and Microfictions
Frank Boyer, ed. William Wilson
The Doppelganger Press, 2009, $8
Many will understand the youthful cross-country jaunts recalled here: “misty farms, each lit by a single bulb, spin by like asteroids.” Invoking Kerouac and Jimi Hendrix, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Boyer portrays the Southwest (“the Rio Grande / glimpsed through rust-colored brush”) and a hallucinatory NYC (“subway steps slick with blood”) as he moves toward romance, redemptive but elusive, and “a fate we cannot guess.” —WS

(Nevertheless Enjoyment
Elizabeth Bryant
Quale Press, 2010, $13
Single paragraphs float like little boats beneath lower-case titles: “of what, in what was wanted)// “Little dark flower cup a black mouth or slippershaped flower.” Beautiful, but what does it mean? Readers choose! In Bryant’s thoughtful prose poems, we play, experiencing how language shapes our responses to each other, the world, ourselves. Thus “Some secretive shy birds must be flushed out.” —LG

Steve Clorfeine, etchings by Christoph Zihlmann
Codhill Press, 2010, $18
Clorfeine based these poems on free-writing texts generated when he and a partner practiced “moving and writing” in alternation. In the opening poem, the dance provides a triumph of symbolic gesture: “Victory to fingertips / (their willingness to fill the air).” The remaining poems range in reference from Buddha to Cracow and in style from the lyric to the gnomic. Zihlmann’s Neo-Expressionist etchings offer a fruitful juxtaposition of words and visual art. —WS