Streets Enough to Welcome Snow by Rosmarie Waldrop

Streets Enough to Welcome Snow by Rosmarie Waldrop


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
My five stars are based on an average rating of the sections. Mostly the book was a good solid 4-star read--you know: smart, classic-rosmarie goodness. But. One section, "Providence in Winter," received one of my famous, late-night, thousand-star downpours. Reading it felt like swimming. Call me a sucker. Call me a snorkeler.

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Humours Run Deep by Tom Bridwell

Humours Run Deep by Tom Bridwell


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
One of those crazy could-have-only-found-it-in-houston books that I'm so glad I bought. This book runs fast across the surface--as folksy as abstract as technical as he wants to be. I tinkled (perfectly literary response) with its many rolling-over inflect/ions. If you can find a copy, pick it up!

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The Romance of Happy Workers by Anne Boyer

The Romance of Happy Workers by Anne Boyer


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Hell to the yes Anne Boyer for her smirky yawp at the piddly moon. Just when I started to worry about whether poetry's meta-isms are just masturbatory, it hit me: masturbating is great. Of course! We should all be rubbing them out with as much gusto as Boyer in this awesome book.

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Miniature: Poems by Mac Wellman

Miniature: Poems by Mac Wellman


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Mac Wellman Mac Wellman Mac Wellman! An utterly sputtering act of macro-writing on (you thought they were small) points. All hail all that choruses in cinched jeering omni-verses. Come combustible choruses! Come wiry, thirsty choruses! The undoable diddles. The pekingese boxes. The nectar just spazzes as it makes its way down. Call that a 'Mac Wellman!' Play it again.

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The Cafe At Light by Mark McMorris

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
ok. solid book. certainly journaly, collecting/recovering conversations, travelogues, architectures. Certainly slipping between times/places and there was a great deal put into the caryatids. And certainly more moderny than I was prepared for, but more prosey too. won me over in the horses passages-god I loved the horse passages-and certainly ok in all other respects and felt and refreshingly informal.

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Shot by Christine Hume

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I am an unwilling proponent of this book because the first poem, Incubatory, convinced me that I hated it. But as I read (forcing myself to read, really, because I like Counterpath press so much) I began to think hating this book is part of loving it. It is annoying, it blurts things out, it gets excited with itself, it overkills -- but it also sees everything (good and bad) through. The thinking is sloppy at times, but it stomps through on pure gall getting us somewhere pretty fucking original. In fact, the book does remind me of a certain type of performance whereby an actor/speaker breaks her contract with the audience, giving her the distance she needs to really freak out and do something. I think that's what happened here. I had to be really far away from the speaker to witness the full range of motion in these poems.

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"People are the same all over, cut"

Vanessa Place & Robert Fitterman - Notes On Conceptualisms: eastcoast/westcoast (2009)

"...The conversation is more presence by its absence.... the fact that the book is not being talked about leads me very much to suspect that its all anyone is talking about..."



Vanessa Place & Robert Fitterman - Notes On Conceptualisms: eastcoast/westcoast (2009)

Vanessa Place & Robert Fitterman
with Kim Rosenfield
filmed by Coco
edited by Fred Barney Taylor


In the DIY video, Place and Fitterman pirate the original eastcoast/westcoast by Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt to ponder the coastal reception of their book "Notes on Conceptualisms."

Robert Fitterman is the author of 11 books of poetry--he lives in NYC.
Vanessa Place is a writer and a lawyer. She lives in LA.

Tuned Droves by Eric Baus

I refuse to rate a book that requires its readers use antenna (either naturally occurring antenna and/or those erected using household materials).

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The Cosmopolitan by Donna Stonecipher

The Cosmopolitan by Donna Stonecipher


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Maybe I should have liked this more. It was tight for sure. Tight and cool and it broke when it needed to break and it got wispy and floated and then it tightened up again and delivered. Delivery is big here. Maybe I'm not being fair because I haven't read this type of poetry in a while. The text felt so separate. It was it's own little engine and I was merely the reader. I didn't ride on the poems and or get inside them. I kept the proper distance and did what I was supposed to do. I guess what I'm saying is: I could have been reading an interesting, well-written article but instead I read these poems.

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Little Ease by Aaron McCollough

Little Ease by Aaron McCollough


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I loved this book this morning. It was cold and I loved hearing myself reading it to myself which is a little engine I created, which fits with the writing and the idea of stricture. I loved how far apart, how long, how missing. I loved the rigid little bridge of epigraphs. I loved the sections and I know it's silly to feel asleep in the language, so maybe taken care of or rocked or just blown on, and because I'm sick today and all my thoughts feel taken out of me and laid like eels on the bedstand -- I'm giving Little Ease one thousand stars. That's right. Every single one.

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Hurry Home Honey: Love Poems 1994-2004

Hurry Home Honey: Love Poems 1994-2004 by Sawako Nakayasu


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Hurry Home Honey by Sawako Nakayasu is a sorta-triptych of love poems that might better be described as relationship-poems. We are cast in and out of relationships, looking forward/back, on the balcony, at play, in the book about. We are evaluating and intuiting, compelled to gather flowers, steal beer. We meet at a word that means everything and/or nothing. Well we sort of meet, but the meanings of 'we' and 'sort of' and 'meet' are all contentious anyway so the sentence projects us forward and there we are, irrevocably, "eyes spin to the play--circomfiting / this here, or andlessness..."

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