New Books in Poetry

To read Venus Thrash‘s The Fateful Apple (Urban Poets and Lyricists, 2014) is to venture into two assertions of self-hood.  The first is a raucous, boundary-setting with the world and the second is reverent consciousness of ancestry and quietude.  Thrash plays out her own duality of self and history and takes the reader on a journey back to the center, the place we return to when no more is expected of us. The connective tissue for these different worlds is music– it is used to place the reader in the nostalgic landscapes of the speaker’s memory.  Beyond the quoting of and allusions to song, there is a musicality of loss and longing that permeates the verse, “…why not call it a painful, joyful kind of knowing, one that stretches the knowing, loving embrace of the blues beyond where the blues thought it could go?” (Dr. Keith Leonard, Foreword pg. 4). From the bustle and life of urban streets to the bucolic and pastoral, Thrash is present in the landscape and the page. “Nighttime furls its dark brow /swallows the town in blackness.// Beyond the bend in the road/ a weather-beaten angel oak// twists into an arthritic pose.” I deeply enjoyed speaking with Venus about her debut collection, her childhood in Georgia, and her life in Washington D.C.  There is a calmness present in her that radiates, even through voice, to others and draws them nearer.  The same can be said for her writing.  It takes the reader to unfamiliar terrain, but with an assured hand guiding them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In Jason Koo‘s new collection, America’s Favorite Poem (C&R Press, 2014), we see a poet placing himself on the timeline of his art. This timeline covers an ethnic, geographic, and artistic lineage that pays homage to Brooklyn’s literary heritage. As founder of Brooklyn Poets,  he extends his literary citizenship to offer community to disparate groups of poets who live and work in the borough. With Whitmanesque, sprawling lines, Koo finds the minutia of introspective content and sound to populate his pieces. What initially appears conversational, contains multitudes. He faces the darkness with an innate humor that assures the reader, nothing is so awful that it can’t be laughed at. This extends to the poet’s lighthearted demeanor and ease with the world. Koo has reverence for his literary forebears and this is expressed in his title choices and placement of the self against the metropolis background, wondering, “Whether I’ll screw this up, whether I’ll ever feel like I have enough,// Whether I am enough.” I encourage listeners to pick up America’s Favorite Poem for the countless pieces that could have been featured on this podcast if given the time. From baseball to artistic gentrification, we discussed it all on a rainy Saturday in NYC. I hope you enjoy this, my inaugural podcast with a brilliant writer at the beginning of a surely monumental career. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In The Earth Avails (Graywolf Press), Mark Wunderlich presents a world unfamiliar to most of us: rural life. While many poets are enamored by the impact of the Internet and the smartphone upon the self and how the digital landscape has changed our understanding of the worlds around us, Wunderlich’s book seems to be arguing that the best way to know who we are is not by excavating the immediate world around us, but the world we’re losing and have nearly lost. In poem after poem, he investigates the relationship between humans and animals, humans and the environment, and through that inquiry we discover that our divorce from nature has not only had devastating consequences on the planet, but on our imaginative and moral lives. And while this would depress most to consider, Wunderlich proves ultimately resilient and hopeful and not just for himself, but for his reader. During our discussion, we cover a lot: his childhood, homosexuality and popular culture, his time in New York City, the relationship between animals and humans, his maturation as a poet, he reads and discusses several poems from his latest collection, and so much more. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Kenneth Goldsmith‘s latest book Seven American Deaths and Disasters (powerHouse Books, 2013), a title taken from the series of Warhol paintings by the same name, is a classic book of defamiliarization. By transcribing the words broadcast in real-time by the media’s unscripted response to historical events, Goldsmith brilliantly drains these infamous moments of cliche. Choosing seven critical moments in American history, which all have in common the spectacle of violence and lose, Goldsmith creates a traumatic prose that yields a poetic response to the John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and John Lennon assassinations, the space shuttle Challenger disaster, the Columbine shootings, 9/11, and the death of Michael Jackson. Because we experience public events most often through the media, those events quickly take on the voltage of performance, and Goldsmith takes advantage of this by being the casting director and choosing who will have the speaking roles. In “Seven American Deaths and Disasters”, most often those speaking roles go to the reporters or radio personalities completely unprepared to articulate what they are reporting. As a result, we see how language fails us, saves us, and also indicts us. At times disturbing and emotional, the book let’s us relive and reconsider those historical events again, but in the present, off-screen, and privately. During our chat, we discuss the resistance his work sometimes encounters in the poetry world, the nature of the “genuine”, how this book deviates from his previous work, and Kenneth and I take turns reading passages from his book, and so much more. I hope you enjoy our chat as much as I did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

David Biespiel‘s Charming Gardeners (University of Washington Press, 2013) is unlike any book I’ve read in a long time. Filled with epistolary poems, his book – despite being populated by the poet’s friends and family – is actually a work of great loneliness. In many ways, Biespiel’s journey is America’s, where the road is both a symbol of arrivals, but also departures, and in between is solitude. On the surface, Biespiel’s poems seem like the private meditations of one man. However, his poems encompass each of us, socially and politically, by illuminating our nation’s contradictory character: a longing for enchantment in a disenchanted world. The poems in Charming Gardeners live between the wilderness and the civilized and the poet, finding himself in this zone of uncertainty, does what any of us would do: call out to those we love. In our conversation we discuss his years in Boston and D.C., the Attic Institute in Portland, the poetry wars, and so much more. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Like great critics, the poetry of great editors is often overlooked, but I don’t see how this can be the case with Don Share, whose work is too good to be ignored. A brilliant combination of the public and private, meshed together by a dark intuitive music, his poems brawl in ways that will startle most readers. But isn’t that what we want from poetry: a language true enough to make us vulnerable. The poems in Wishbone are both brooding and sensitive and at times even funny, but perhaps most importantly, Share’s poems are humane. During our chat we talk about his formative years in Boston, his editorial partnership with Christian Wiman at Poetry Magazine, a poet’s identity, and so much more. I hope you enjoy our talk as much as I did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

The Late Parade (Liveright, 2013) has received a lot of attention and it’s well-deserved. Adam Fitzgerald‘s poetry is a berserk love song and between his high-rhetoric and experimental disposition, the reader is treated to a performance that pushes delight into zones of trauma. The poems in The Late Parade nearly outbrave us with their will, except each stanza and line, though dense with wattage, is also heavy with vulnerability and yields – almost as an act of compassion – a strange and emptying alchemy we associate with a poetry that exonerates us from ourselves. During our chat we discuss the malls of New Jersey, his formation as a poet (and reader), his friendship with John Ashbery, and so much more. I hope you enjoy our chat as much as I did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In Marvelous Things Overheard (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), Ange Mlinko‘s poems exhibit a sonically rich landscape articulated by a beautiful voice that is so measured and covert that history itself is seduced into singing to us who are decaying in the present. Mostly centered in the Mediterranean, Mlinko’s poems guide us into the prefectures of time to recover and reinvent the enchantment of our beginnings and by doing so enlarges our imagination as we move into the future. While her themes are global, her eye is local, and the combination yields a sort of prudence most of us have forgotten we need in order to live more truly and more fiercely. During out chat, we talk about her childhood in Philadelphia, her years in Morocco and Beirut, the Mediterranean’s impact on her poetry, and so much more. I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

At the age of five, poet Stephanie Strickland and her sister received a book from their grandmother that included a poem by John Farrar called “Serious Omission.” I know that there are dragons St. George’s, Jason’s, too, And many modern dragons With scales of green and blue;   But though I’ve been there many times And carefully looked through, I cannot find a dragon In the cages at the zoo! The poem stayed with Strickland.  “What is the serious omission?” she asks.  “To not be able to find that dragon?  To fail to discriminate the hugely many implicate orders of life?” These questions, not to mention dragons themselves, drive Strickland’s new book of poems, Dragon Logic (Ahsahta Press, 2013).  Her fiercely intelligent and morally acute work captures e-dragons and sea dragons, as well as a beast she calls the “Hidden Dragon of Unstable Ruin.”  The poems even offer “Dragon Maps,” that take “catastrophic forms and safepaths,” finding and figuring their way through the physical, mechanical, virtual, mythical, chimerical, and hypothetical environments we now inhabit. And if you find yourself wondering just what a dragon is, that’s the right question.  “Dragons are mythical and abstract,” explains Strickland, “mythic embodiments of abstract power, from the snake in Eden, to devouring sea monsters, to the latest special FX apocalyptic creation from Hollywood. The dragon hunt that matters for me is tracking the beast as it slips, dizzyingly, from real to configurational (electronically generated) space, always aware that where we live, in either case, is the belly of this beast.” *Photograph courtesy of Star Black (copyright). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Mary Ruefle‘s newest book of poems Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013) is brilliant. Her poems have the confidence of a poet who is utterly fearless, but wise enough to never come out and brag about it. Her poetry is honest, but dignified, thoughtful and bizarre, and with a fidelity to lived experience that is heartbreaking. During our chat we talk about childhood, the life and mind of the artist, her neighborhood in Vermont, and so much more. I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry