A book of poetry, a book of collaged pages, a wondrous journey through hardship, hard thinking, with glimmers of light accompanying the reader. Sarah Rosenthal has created a masterwork!

Comin' ' Round is a tour of James Sherry's career as a poet, thinker, and influential member of the indie poetry world. Each of the included works is virtuosic in its own way, but what to say about them all together? At last, I realized that for all these years Sherry has been performing a startlingly clear-eyed investigation of the long fraught relationship between our interdependence (as humans and as earthly creatures) and our will for power. In its concern with how we live together in our various linguistic and literal ecosystems, this is a very timely book indeed.

Without reference of horizon farther makes navigation by usual instruments, and heroes, impossible. We recognize the image on its cover as sea; we recognize its language as English. Recognition ends there. We are in a funnel descent -- a downward circular motion that washes section titles from one another until only the letter O remains. Words also turn into and fall from each other: always compass / encompassing passing / collapsing / as if beauty were complete / not. We fall into the sea of Thackrey's sleight of ear -- a straight line of words becomes a spiral, a whole book a circling back. We enter the letter O -- lens opening, contraction -- the slip space between letters, words, lines, the said, the implied echo. This is how she turns us through the open portal of order's disorder, a history that begins with sundering and ends with shattering -- This is how she collapses the compass so that known coordinates disappear, making possible this paean to as if beauty that is infinitely farther.

Try Selected Poems by Norman Fischer in small pieces, koanstyle or parablelength, yet before you know it, his questions on mind, existence, compassion branch voluminously by location and torque the decades. The books meet each other as movements, variations.

Extraordinarily rich pages of Serge Gavronsky poem/text, and Constance Lane's art/images, work together. The manuscript of this work has been photographed and is here presented as the book, one you want in your collection of contemporary poetry and contemporary artist's books. Chax has always sought to expand our notion of both poetry & book, and here, we simply had to leave the work alone and give it to you. A wide book, 8.5 inches, by 5.5 inches high, you will find new things on every page the more you look. Gavronsky works with the elements of language, weaving them into texts about language and life, and Lane illuminates the work to invite us to always see more, think more, experience more.

Skeleton Keys is a hybrid work consisting of short pieces connected by memory, association, obsession, and language. Visual phenomena, thinking, writing, modes of apprehending the world. What we consider in the predawn hours, what we forget in harsh daylight. Personal mythology, tangential observation, shopping lists of the mind, an immersion in one's surroundings, a separation from one's surroundings. Written in a language that partakes of the character of poetry and prose. Insistent, subliminal, insidious, intentional.

DuPlessis's Selected Poems is a generous collection including early work rewriting the lyric through serial poems to a comprehensive selection from her long poem Drafts. The book includes work from Traces, with Days up to 01/01/2020, including a selection of one of her collage poems.

A life in, of, and for poetry: Michael Gottlieb generously lays bare the one he has led, putting in plain terms the measures by which the discipline asserts itself as a constitutive force... Gottlieb gives us an immensely valuable document in the annals of Language writing and contemporary literary autobiography.

What is the meaning of light? Can humans even comprehend such a thing? In Visible Instruments, Michael Kelleher invites the reader to be mindful of these questions, and to ask what she can know, what he can do, how they might live in the present, the future. Everything is visible in these meditations, like an xray, though that might only begin to help us understand what it all means, what we mean.

The conflict Norman Fischer speaks of in this poem is an inherent component of the universe. He writes of the human dilemma, the struggles of daily life, and the desire to 'hold the world in place, ' showing us how not to be mired in any one spot. Freedom is won by tirelessly moving forward. The lines breathe: the poet's breath, and the complexity of his thought, visualized on the page.--Anne Tardos

Poetry.

The book by prolific L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet Bruce Andrews, SWOON NOIR never fails to shake up linguistic expectations, without ridding itself of Andrews' characteristically wide ranging diction and attention to sound, with lines like Ventriloquism helluva Cinderella and Rapt literalist proxy poppers. Andrews has published several dozen books of poetry and performance scores. He has taught Political Science at Fordham University since 1975.

The visceral and the intellectual, the fragmentary and the full, the future and memory-Jonathan Brannen interrogates opposites in these facing pairs, brilliantly illuminating the zone of language that operates between. Sharp and bright, it's a collection that sees the world in all its detail and in vivid color; it sparks the mind.-Cole Swensen

Winner of the Gil Ott Award. In Trace Peterson's first collection of poems, SINCE I MOVED IN, ... desire is the restless remainder of body subtracted from voice, or maybe it's voice from body. Whitmanian in its quick and tender grandeur, its penchant for direct address, and its abstract kinkiness and longing, SINCE I MOVED IN moves exorably from the transgendering (non) performance of ' Trans Figures' to the startled, suspended chiliasm of ' Spontaneous Generation, ' where at last the fetish body, dispersed into landscape, becomes simply an ambient mode of seeing, or saying, in a posteverything ecology where voice broods over the face of the waters, becoming the (prosthetic) body of the world. - Tenney Nathanson

This is an immense book, one in which Notley takes language, as she has it, 'from hearsay to heresy' by the speed and awe of an unwavering attention to the seams, seems and semes of words and sentences. This is the work of an iconoclast, a semioclast, where semantics become semeantics, and the byzantics and antiques from Christianity to Christine are molten down & recast into 21st Century mental shapes in the redhot heartred retort of a present day alchemist of mind. Alice Notley has the uncanny ability to go from the everyday mundane to the psychocosmic in one warpspeed stutter or typographical stumble, at what Andre Breton called 'la vitesse grand V.' This is writing of the highest orderPierre Joris.

She is widely recognized as one of the most innovative and consequential performance poets of the last half century. A visionary, a medium, a storyteller possessed of extraordinary perlocutionary powers, capable of locating and seizing upon a listener's every exposed nerve ending, Tracie Morris is a word magician who can make virtually every utterance into music and manifesto. -- Robin D.G. Kelley, professor of History and Black Studies at UCLA, author of several books, including Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.

One pleasure afforded by Steven Salmoni's wondrous A Day of Glass is the quiet judiciousness with which it traces the poet's necessarily imperfect efforts to delineate and place. But this critical attentiveness turns out to harbor something more intimate and tender: through our tracings we let the world trace itself within us, a reciprocity in which we don't so much make claims as let ourselves be claimed: On the other hand, the sea is not the other hand; To begin to drift / to remember the form you lose when, as drift, / the sea is unthinkable. If the wave is everywhere, the wave / is everywhere. -- Tenney Nathanson, Glass is a transparent substance made in part of sand. It can be used, with sand, to measure time, in a sandglass. Windows and greenhouses are made of it. A glass can be used to reflect the self, like a mirror. Glass can be container and ornament. You can drink from a glass. You can see better by wearing glass(es). Watery surfaces often resemble glass. Glass is surface through which the eye sees depth. It is at once a wall and a portal, a form that reveals its own incapacities. Philip Glass is a composer who deals in repetitions that open to reveal the beauty of differences. Steven Salmoni's A Day of Glass puts all these meanings into play. An illuminating meditation on art as reflection, and as constant movement. -- Susan Schultz

If in Sarah Riggs' Pomme & Granite, language shimmers as register of pure light, Eavesdrop's iridescence signs the stakes of dance. Each sequence, in deploying fresh ways to balance language differences, brings the ear in touch with the whole of thinking bodies, bodies that are elements of the sky -- yet knowing when to hit the soundboard of meaning, hard. The stakes are love and the existential tremour of our moment, culled in passim [and in passion] from speech on three continents and dreams and ancient history; or, yet, eavesdropped from ' interior' and ' exterior' gleanings swimming under a sky full of drones . . . This exquisite pas-de-trois -- engaging, as text or subtext, English, French, Arabic, moves toward a stunning finale, hued in the stark black and white of certain cemeteries. - Gail Scott

Poetry. This lovely addition to Chax Press' line of chapbooks features Portland poet David Abel's elegiac sequence on love and grief. Written in New York following the 1988 death of Robert Duncan but published in 2006, Abel's poem takes as its point of departure a line from Christopher Marlowe, who writes Black is the beauty of the brightest day. From this ambiguous, mournful line, Abel fashions a beautifully spare set of poems that encompass and intertwine concerns both philosophical and quotidian, displaying both sadness and acceptance in the face of death. As he writes, My heart climbs/like a fish, dumb/and I swallow stones: /love's incomprehension/smoothed by/water. David Abel, co-curator of the Spare Room reading series, is a poet, editor, bookseller, raga singer, and poker player who moved to Portland in 1997 after stints in New York and Albuquerque

Poetry. Asian American Studies. Revised and enlarged edition.

There are two kinds of readers in English, those who are passionate fans of the poetry of Linh Dinh and those who have yet to read his writing.... Linh Dinh looks at the world with the clearest eyes imaginable, a walking example of the role of the real at the heart of the surreal.--Ron Silliman

Found texts are archeological artifacts. Mac Cormack didn't find her texts by accident. Implexures (2003) is an exploration of her ancestry, which evidently goes back to Elizabethan times (when the word implexure, meaning fold or folding, was still, if only rarely, in use).

The poem is in part a series of historical letters made of heterogeneous voices from many sources and periods--To absorb a history of family through the centuries requires a forebear's attention to facts and no fear of paper (I10). The voices (and years) cannot always (and never easily) be identified or distinguished from one another--'Language as primary environment' applied to re-reading letters (one's own and others') the decades interleaved on every surface to blur and redefine the living in & perception's architecture (I44-45)--except perhaps for the (italicized) letters home from a modern young woman traveling to places like Mexico, Italy, Greece, and Turkey.