Codhill Press, 2007, $10
Vanguard Voices of the Hudson Valley: Poetry 2007
Edited by Nan Alderson
Mohonk Mountain Stage Company, 2007, $15
Twenty-two area poets take wing in this impressively diverse anthology. Contest winners Christine Lilian Turczyn, Ken Holland, and Jo Pitkin were chosen by eminent poet and Vassar professor Eamon Grennan, who cites “their ability to compact their experience into a language that bristles with sensuous immediacy and affecting implication.”
Sorry, Tree
Eileen Myles
Wave Books, April 2007, $14
The former director of the St. Marks Poetry Project, “openly female” write-in candidate for president, and instructor in Bard’s MFA program writes rambling, free-associative verse infused to the spiky roots with a lesbian-punk sensibility. “I don’t mind today, but the everyday makes me barf.” Guaranteed to flip fatuous wigs.
The Wytheport Tales
Laurence Carr
Codhill Press, 2006, $12
Playwright and poet Carr subverts genre boundaries with these works of “microfiction set in, around, and under the mythical town of Wytheport.” Formatted like blank verse, teasing the ear like theatrical monologues, these dense, often mystical tales conjure worlds with grace and economy. “To each, one’s own oblivion.”
Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry
Edited by Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton and David Trinidad
Soft Skull Press, 2007, $19.95
In this lively collection of collective verse, John Ashbery jams with Kenneth Koch; Violet Snow and Sparrow scat-sing cat song; and dozens more poets get funky together. “Process Notes” explicate collaborative methods: e-mail, postcards, sharing one typewriter, improvising. T. Begley and Olga Broumas write, “Who speaks? Collaboration is compassion. Erasure of ‘ego’ and ‘muse.’”
This article appears in July 2007.
