Winner of the Motherwell Prize
Kaisa Ullsvik Miller's debut collection affirms the reader's perhaps heretofore unrecognized need for a gentle and daily massaging of profanely innocuous, even corporate language into deliverable spiritual meaning. This is a need that, once identified, becomes acute... [ read more ]
Unheimlich children of Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde, the Modernist Novel and a decadent despairing of it, Aaron Kunin's characters are embodied by speech—witty, philosophical, narratological. They speak and they think, occasionally, about problems of the novel, but just as often about slights, real or imagined; originary issues of form and content; things to eat and drink.... [ read more ]
Poet Carl Martin's literal and figurative "Brit vernacular" asks of its reader nothing less than a total ignorance of expectation. These poems, coming after a long silence—Martin's first book appeared in 1991, and his second in 1998—engage Romantic tropes such as Vision, Beauty, and the Self cheek-by-jowl with a Pop madness and a Modern despair, all in a high cadence that is winkingly isolate, stunningly productive.... [ read more ]
Inasmuch as rock n' roll belongs yet to the young, this is a young book. Its debut concerns are those of the youth culture inasmuch as when we are young we are closer to home, to origin, to the primal disjunctions supplied by our gaps/leaps in understanding. "This is called angled feet this is called/ separate parts of faces/ this is about body parts it's called/ wide-eyed radio hour[.]"... [ read more ]