New Books in Poetry

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Megan Moriarty From the Dictionary of Living Things Finishing Line Press, 2014 Part dictionary, part guide to living, and part historical record of content, From the Dictionary of Living Things turns its own pages. It is a beautifully crafted and thought-provoking first collection from a poet at the beginnings of her career. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Chapbookapalooza, 2014 Lyric Hunter Swallower Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014 Mastering a bi-lingual prosody, these poems confront the idea of “city” and our romanticizing of containers. They show a brilliant mind disassembling trite societal structures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

At Chapbookapalooza, our headliner goes first. And here she is with a stunning collection of poetry that subverts pop culture by placing it in direct conversation with everything it hints at but is too shifty to engage outright. With Elegant and cerebral verse, Leah Umansky shows us in Don Dreams and I Dream (Kattywompus Press, 2014) that nothing is surface-level when minds are involved. Her unforgettable speaker engages with the fictitious Don Draper and everything he stands for in our consume/consumer/consumed reality. This book will make you happy. Don’t you want to be happy? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In his new book of poems, Origins (Palimpsest Press, 2012), the Canadian writer Darryl Whetter uses metaphor to excavate the links between pre-historic life, extinction, evolution and modern-day sex. In this interview with the New Books Network, Whetter says the fossilized remains of ancient creatures are like poems that use metaphors to convey emotion and truth. “Fossils share a lot of analogues with poetry,” Whetter says. “For one, we get that incredible power of compression.” He explains that from fossilized fragments, scientists extrapolate whole creatures and ecosystems. “And that’s so much like poetry, where to just take the most common tool of poetry, metaphor, we’re getting a lot of ideas compressed into a few words.” Origins, published in 2012, begins with the fossil cliffs at Joggins, Nova Scotia, a UNESCO World Heritage Site where coal-age forests flourished 310 million years ago. The book also takes Whetter in search of the dinosaurs at Drumheller, Alberta and the rich fossil finds of the Burgess Shale in British Columbia. Along the way, he visits Charles Darwin’s house in Kent, England and ponders the mating habits of the students at the universities where he has taught as an English professor. Darryl Whetter is the author of a book of short stories, A Sharp Tooth in the Fur (2003). His first novel The Push and the Pull was published in 2008 and his latest novel Keeping Things Whole came out in 2013. In this interview, Darryl Whetter discusses some of the poems in Origins and why he felt compelled to write them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Dorothea Lasky‘s Rome (Liveright, 2014) is a collection that will catch you off guard. Lasky lures the reader in with familiar language and imagery only to have them suddenly realize they’ve been brought to room where the walls wobble and collapse, eternally revealing darker passageways. She is undoubtedly a language poet but also one who sees language as a roadblock. The communication is in the sound. Just as with Hemingway, words are merely an entry point to meaning. Stripped of even punctuation, these lines hurl themselves at the reader. Do not take this economy of language as simplicity. Within it are the layers of desire, grief, betrayal, and rage. Lasky’s speakers embody everything that is human yet alien, familiar and foreign. Emboldened by their own savage humanity, they assert themselves into landscapes and consciousness. But this is not easily won– Lasky lets us into her process, revision, and search for obsession. If she cannot lose herself in the poem then she will not offer it up to the world. When at sixty it might hit you What you’ve given up When your sentimental heart Might let its hair down and see The sun for the first time When you pick up this book, read the lines aloud, impose your will on them, and see where they take you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Bangalore (Copper Canyon Press 2013) by Kerry James Evans calls out to its reader from an urgency that is its own place and time. He has inhabited many spaces, geographically and socially. His poems reach out from them. Evans shows us that poetry, as the great communicator, can hold the violence of this life and render it in such a way that it startles our desensitized consciousness once again. This is not for shock value, this is his way of picking up a portion of our world and bearing it to you, palms up. Do with this what you will, but it is truth. Evans dares to address the realities of class in the United States by implicating himself in the narrative. He brings the reader to layers of this country many will never experience. Effigy of myself. Effigy of anything but Alabama and Alabama all the same, boiled peanuts rotting green on a gas station counter outside Montgomery, reminding me of you, and how you cling to life: one tendril coiling a pair of pothole diggers. He imposes no structure on his poems, but instead allows them to find their own way into this world, to guide his hand toward understanding. I encourage readers to pay close attention to his masterful handling of poems in parts. The sections breathe life into one another while winding, like kudzu, around and over, covering and revealing. Pay attention to this young poet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

She Has A Name (Four Way Books 2014) by Kamilah Aisha Moon is a startling collection that dares to intimately address the way a family transforms when caring for an Autistic child. Deemed a “biomythography,” (a term coined by Audre Lorde), the works are cautious in their rendering and respectful in their assertions. The reader is taken into the minds of each family member as they navigate the joys and difficulties of shifting their own perception to meet that of a loved one who experiences the world through an entirely different lens. Although we are not offered insight into the mind of the youngest sister, I dare say she is the poetry, she lives in the verse that we the readers must decipher and make our own. In this debut collection, Moon also offers a singular view of the speaker in later pieces. Although there is a disconnect with the voices of the family, the speaker carries them with her as she wades through the world Mysteries of mass wrong turns, sick leaders and sirens forever sexy land or sea. The unequaled rush and horror of forgetting ourselves. I believe this collection will be a companion to many souls sorting out their past and present realities, reconciling themselves with the worlds they’ve been given, and seeking to translate the many layers of existence into one, readable language. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In my dream, I am the president. When I awake, I am a beggar of the world. The landay represents an oral tradition of a mostly illiterate people. It is a dirge, a calling out to, that is specific to each woman who sings it. Even within the confines of an unwavering regime, life finds a way. We, as Americans, will recognize ourselves in these landays. We will see our drones and occupying soldiers enter the consciousness and historic tradition of an ancient people. May God destroy your tank and your drone, you who’ve destroyed my village, my home. Eliza Griswold traveled to Afghanistan extensively as a reporter and then again to collect the landays she had encountered. Throughout their hesitancy, the Pashtun women left Eliza with the representation of a millennia of culture to decipher. With the help of translators, she took the folk couplets from literal translation to poetic pieces featured alongside their history. I am a Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014) combines her translations with Seamus Murphy’s photography for a book that bridges artistic and reference. It is a necessary collection that allows us, but a brief moment in the lives and generations past of Pashtun women. When sisters sit together, they always praise their brothers. When brothers sit together, they sell their sisters to others. Although this is a much shorter format than our regular podcast, we want to get word of this collection to you in any way we can. It represents not only a historic oral tradition in poetry but a people that hold tightly to their culture in the face of constant change and war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Language Arts (Wave Books 2014) by Cedar Sigo is a departure and then reintroduction to form on avant garde’s terms. In addition to disparate explosions of imagery, Cedar trains the ear for surprise of sound and a prosody that was born of childhood prayer, exposure to native tongue, and an understanding of musical composition. You enter a foreign landscape and exit much wiser.     Kiss the lights and they change out over the Stardust Cities are huge machines for sorting poets Starting down the cellophane-enfolded hills Even cast off lines have their own pull and rhyme. (Excerpt from “After Self-Help”) His love of poetry extends far beyond his own written word. I was impressed by the wealth of knowledge he drew upon in our talk, let alone in the creation of his verse. There is a reverence that any listener would find endearing and ensures us that our art is in the hands of a master. And I tell you, the sonnet never looked so good. Just like his poems, our conversation was full of surprises and revelation. From identity poetics to poets in translation, Cedar was candid and engaging. He invites readers into his inner world via the page and keeps them there with twists and unexpected turns. He is effortless. I invite you to listen to our exchange, hear his work, and purchase Language Arts so that you may return to it time and time again, discovering something new with each read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Kevin Prufer is a rare poet who manages to layer narratives and weave metrical variations seamlessly into his work, all while placing it on the page in an organic and “effortless” way. This is especially notable when we come to understand the process by which his poems are born; the disparate connections and glorious jumps, as though into blackness, that he makes in each piece. Churches (Four Way Books, 2014) is a collection that dazzles with sound and macabre landscapes where anything is possible. The title of a poem that we did not feature (and listeners must seek out) is “The Idea of the Thing and Not the Thing Itself” is, in my opinion, an excellent representation of the entire collection. It is as though ideas manifest into characters and anecdotes just to explain themselves better, then turn back into the intangible and unreachable, leaving only a hint of themselves in the verse. Prufer is a poet that you can trust with your mind. He may bring you to the reaches of subjective reality but you always return somehow more whole and with a greater understanding of the human conditions of suffering, grief, love, and fear. He is modern poet whose lines you can scan for meter and device! Just as the Romantics, he brings the abstract of Negative Capability to life on the page. It is for these reasons and many more that I suggest lovers of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and all semblances of the written word, pick up Kevin Prufer’s newest collection, Churches and let him take you where he will. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry