Valerie Loveland
Reading Sarah Gambito is a relief after reading some heavy stuff. Not to say that Gambito is light but she is witty and funny.
Matadora has a lot of poems about Paloma, which means girl (and also means dove). Paloma is a character who writes some of these poems and is also the subject of some of the poems. I like the poems with Paloma best, especially the ones she herself writes. There are a lot of poems about New York (where Gambito lives), and about being Asian.
I first heard a lot of poems from this book when I listened to them online. The audience was really responsive, which is always great to hear.
The poems and lines are not regular. The poet has great titles and boring titles in the book. She even committed the sin of naming one poem “Untitled,” but I forgive her because it is my favorite poem in the book. It's wonderful!
I don't always understand the poems, but I feel like it isn't important. I like the way the words swirl and lead me through them. I am looking forward to reading her next book, which I also got from the library.
My favorites in the book:
Untitled (Glad I could include this because it is my favorite favorite!)
Paloma's Light Journal: May 8th
Paloma's Light Journal: June 6th (First poem)
Sonogram (This one has audio)
This book was very different than I expected. I didn't know I had a pre-conceived notion of “poems about illness”. Once I started the book, I realized most poems about illness were quiet, and sparse, which makes sense, because an illness often diminishes a person's strength. I very often get the impression that a poet has a shorter breath so their lines, stanzas and poems are short.
Dent's poems are huge: the lines are so long, they sometimes resemble prose poems, many poems have just one huge stanza, a couple poems in the book have 14+ parts to them. Her sentences are also big–she gets so many words out with just one breath. Dent is so strong and often defiant in this book. I kept looking at her stern author's photo in the back of the book, the vibrancy of the words, and I can't believe I am reading about someone who died, especially someone who died at 47 years old.
This book is wonderful. It is very hard to read some of these poems, but this book is important to read. I was pleased that there was unapologetic sexuality in the poems. It wasn't pornographic or anything like that, but she does mention things. She helps you understand by showing you everything.
The only part of the book I didn't love was the Magnetic Poetry Poems. They were pretty good, especially considering the limitations of the premise, but they just weren't as good as the rest of the book.
My favorites in the book:
R.I.P., My Love
Everybody Loves a Winner I could only find the first page of this, but thought posting part of it was better than not posting it at all.
Fourteen Days in Quarantine (I love this 14-part poem but couldn't find it online)
What Calendars Have Become
I liked Shippy's shorter poems in this book more than I liked the longer poems. I really liked a lot of Shippy's images and way of phrasing things, but I had trouble following how the images were connected to each other in the longer poems. There were too many images, and I had trouble tying them together. Overall the poems were witty, and I enjoyed the images in the poems being loosely tied together, there were just issues when the poem was longer, there were just too many and I couldn't keep track of them all.
I liked the titles in the book. Most were complex with more than one word. They were compelling. The line and stanza breaks were orderly. They were either one stanza, or each stanza was divided evenly.
My favorite poems in the book:
Bunnyman, an Elegy
It Ain't Boasting If...
Crack
M axEr nst
This book was great. Worth is full of history and culture, and is about topics that I'm not used to seeing in poetry, like Chanel No. 5, various jewels and jewel houses. The title on the cover has the word “Worth” on what looks like the vintage clothing tag, and 3 photos of the same ornate dress and hat. I picked it at the library because I thought it was going to be about vintage clothes. It wasn't about clothes, mostly, but it didn't disappoint me.
I really liked the second part of the book, which were poems about different kinds of made up Finches (Vampire Finch, Devil Finch, Good-Bye Finch). I don't know if the finches match the rest of the book, but I don't mind a book not being “cohesive,” and I didn't feel like they stuck out or seemed out of place.
Her lines were pretty long in these poems, except for one very long poem that had very very short lines. I thought the short lines were distracting, and preferred Schiff's very long lines instead. There are times when Schiff hypenates words so the word enjambs, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.
This seems petty to mention, but I didn't like the font they used in the book, and felt like it made the poems harder to read.
My favorites from the book:
House of Worth
House of Dior
Devil Finch
House of De Beers (This poem is about a diamond thief named Adam Worth)
This is the first book by Chelsey Minnis I've read and I really enjoy her style–I am going to have to pick up her other books.
Her writing is a lot of fun, and I've never seen her technique for breaking lines before: she fills the spaces in her poems with periods. She spreads out the poem this way and the entire page is full. Theoretically, I really like this, but in practice, I feel like it spreads the poem out a little too much. It isn't bad, but it feels just a tiny bit too slow. I liked her few poems without the technique better. I really wanted to love the periods because it is new and visually attractive. She has a few prose poems in the book, but no poems with traditional line breaks.
Her word choices and images are unusual, striking, and kind of demented. The poems have a great sense of humor.
Her titles were usually just one word. I wish they were longer, because I feel like she could have come up with some great titles.
I love seeing someone doing something new. I am excited to read her other books. This is another library book that I am going to have to buy!
My favorites in this book: (I am having a hard time finding poems online for Minnis. There are lots and lots of reviews that include parts of poems, but not whole poems)
Report on the Babies
Aquamarine Three Paragraphs from the bottom of page is the poem.
The Skull Ring
A Speech About the Moon Click “Read a Little” at the top of the page.
I was kind of disappointed in this book. It probably was groundbreaking for its time, but the language seemed really dated. Usually when something has lingo from a different time peroid, I think it is charming, but in this case, it kind of accentuated how racism and sexism was acceptable. I hear the movie is really good, but I'm not sure if I am going to check it out because I didn't like the book that much. It was okay, but I was expecting more.
I thought this book was uneven, I liked some poems a lot more than others, and certain sections more than others. I thought Wolff's poetry was best when it was shorter, and I thought the poems that were many poems together under the same title weren't as good as the ones alone on a single subject. The longer poems seemed more vague, and I had a harder time following.
The poems take some work to understand but her best poems are definitely worth the extra reading.
Most of the poems seemed unconnected to each other, and I couldn't tell why they were grouped into sections. I don't mind when a book is not “cohesive,” so it didn't bother me, but I thought I would mention it. I also didn't mind that her line and stanza breaks seemed sort of random, and were not regular.
Wolff's titles were really good.
My favorite poems in the book:
After Balthus
Roman Polanski
Autobiographia Copularia
Life of Sorts
I loved this book, even though I didn't really read any of the Nancy Drew books when I was younger. This is more about the two authors who wrote Nancy Drew, and also the way Nancy Drew is an icon. I liked the way the author also included information about women's rights and roles in society at the different time periods and how it relates to Nancy as a character. I feel like I missed out by not reading the Nancy Drew mysteries when I was little.
Kasandra Larsen's book [b:Stellar Telegram 9534596 Stellar Telegram (chapbook) Kasandra Larsen http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1287445584s/9534596.jpg 14420758] is filled with vibrant poems. The poet lives in New Orleans, and you can see the landscape there. There are some poems that mention Katrina, but aren't about the hurricane itself. Larsen is really good at rhyme, and I would often read the poems, and not notice there was a rhyme scheme until I read the poem a second time. There is a musicality to her writing and the words fit so well together, they easily flow. The words Larsen chooses are rich, especially the verbs, which is something that you don't notice at first glance, but infuses the poems with life. Her titles are descriptive, and often it seems like they have their own form/rhythm (you can see this in the titles of some of the poems I selected as my favorites).My favorites in the book: Solitude and the Uses of WaterYou See What Happened When They Tried to StopThe Time it Takes for Starlight to ArriveOn a Senior Picture Not Seen Since Katrina
This was an interesting book. Even if I didn't like a poem, I usually liked what the poet was trying to do with the poem. He wrote poems in the voice of The Oregon Trail (written in 1875) and or based on the Monk Hsuan tseng's trip in The Journey to the West (written in the 16th century).
My favorites in the book are the ones that are written in the poet's voice himself. They are imaginative, and beautiful. He has a lot of recurring characters or subjects in the book, which I always enjoy. Peacocks and birds appear very often in poems. Ronald Regan is also in several poems. The subjects for the poems are wide, he writes from the perspective of a dung pile, and another about Robinson Crusoe.
His titles vary, but about half of them are non-descript one or two word titles, the rest are more complex. He has many types of line and stanza breaks, and the lengths of his poems are vastly different.
My favorites from this book (it looks like none of the poems in the book were published in magazines before the book was published):
When Ronald Regan was a Boy
Blue and Note from the Plagiarist
Eagle Grief Stream the Horse of the Will is Held and Reined
The Bird
This book seemed too simple to me, and had a lot of ideas that I've seen before. I was disappointed. She also has a lot of extra words that don't really add to the poem, or repetition of specific lines that weren't very strong.
Almost every title was just one word, or something vague. I didn't like her very short lines in a lot of the poems, so I was glad when she had a few that were prose poems.
She got a pretty high rating on Goodreads, so it seems like a lot of people are enjoying these poems and connecting with them. Morling also is featured and published in some great websites and magazines. Her poetry just isn't my thing I guess. You can't like every book!
I'm glad I borrowed this from the library instead of buying it.
I was reading this book for research, and really enjoyed it. I didn't like the author's personal life story as much as I loved her talking about clothing in literature, but it was a very interesting read, and exactly the kind of book I was looking for.
Picardie worked as a journalist for Vogue, so she was a fashion insider, but she also had an interesting family history that often related to clothing. Although to someone who cares about clothes, anyone's family history relates to clothes.
I have never read Thomas Lux before, and my friend Beth recommended him, so I borrowed his book from the library.
He is solidly good. He is very straightforward, and his poetry has got me thinking about my introduction to poetry. When I first discovered poetry, I read books that were beautiful, but didn't have a lot of mystery to them. I don't read a lot of poetry like that these days, and it was nice to read a poetry collection that seemed like a sampler to me instead of a “collection of poetry” where all the poems have to be linked somehow, and to read words that show themselves as they are right from the beginning. Here is a quote I found about Lux on Poetry Magazine's bio of him: “Lux is vocal about the tendency in contemporary poetry to confuse ‘difficulty' with ‘originality.' In an interview with Cerise Press, Lux stated: ‘There's plenty of room for strangeness, mystery, originality, wildness, etc. in poems that also invite the reader into the human and alive center about which the poem circles.'“
I didn't really think about this before, and I am glad that I now have the chance to ponder about the style of contemporary poetry that I have been reading lately. (For the record, I think both styles are great.)
A lot of the poems were about obscure subjects, and I felt like I was learning while I read them. I also felt like Lux's love of language permeated from every poem. It was a lot of fun to read.
My favorites from the book:
The People of the Other Village
Virgule
History Books
Pecked to Death by Swans
I really enjoyed Vap's poetry. Her work is complex, and has a lot of enjoyable connections and witty lines.
Her poetry isn't easy. It takes multiple readings of each poem to come to an understanding, and I wouldn't say that it is a clear understanding. I like that she makes you work for each poem.
Vap has a lot of poems about horses, her subjects are whimsical and her language is playful. She has good titles that add to the poetry's meaning–very often you only understand them after you read the poem, which is a favorite of mine.
Her line breaks are similar to the way I've been writing lately. She has a lot of long lines and short lines together with stanzas of varying lengths. I never see other poets breaking their lines like this, so it made me feel better about the way I've been breaking my lines lately. I have to get a copy of this library book–I feel like I can learn a lot from Vap, and this book.
My favorite poems from this book:
A Riddle for My Birthday
The Pink House
Testify
Iris Enjoys the Secret
People warned me about this book. Everyone who read it told me that it made them cry, so I was ready for the crying, but I wasn't ready for how great the book was. With a subject like Katrina, it would be very easy to be emotionally manipulative with the reader, but Patricia Smith is above that kind of thing. She doesn't have to use those tactics because she writes beautifully, even when she is talking about terrible things. I think this book is going a long way to educating people about what happened in New Orleans.
One of the best poems in the book was about the 34 people were left in a nursing home to drown. It is called “34” and is in 34 sections. Each of the 34 voices is distinct and haunting.
There are a few poem series in the book which are all separated throughout the book. There is one on Voodoo, a series of tankas. Smith also introduces a dog named Luther B, whose owner chained him up outside with lots of food and water because they couldn't bring him and planned to be right back.
This book is heartbreaking and gorgeous. Frequently with a full length book about one topic, I feel like the poet loses focus, or runs out of ideas, but not in Blood Dazzler.
My favorites in the book:
Won't Be but a Minute
34
Ms. Thang Sloshes in the Direction of Home
Here is a link of Patricia Smith Reading poems from Blood Dazzler.
Borrowing books from the library doesn't save me money when the book is so good I have to find a copy for my own collection!
I loved this book. I thought Kocot's first book, 4 was good. I enjoyed it but it wasn't my favorite. I wanted to read the other book of hers that I checked out of the library, but wasn't excited about it. This book was great! It was a wonderful surprise to see Kocot's images, language, everything more precise, focused, colorful. It was a lot of fun to see a poet I thought was already good become great.
The things I complained about in 4 were all gone: almost all of her titles were fun and complex, there were no poems in form.
I am still not sure if she is the Noelle in Matthew Zapruder's “Twenty Poems for Noelle.” I know she wrote “A Poem for Matthew Z” which appeared in Tin House, but I haven't found the poem yet.
I am so glad I picked her books up on a whim. I had never heard of her before.
My favorites from the book (hard to pick just four of them!):
The Word Starts with an E
There is a Tiara Dripping from the Skylights
Passing Over Water
The Newlyweds and the Funny Papers
I picked up Noelle Kocot's 4 at the library. I just got done reading Matthew Zapruder's The Pajamaist which included the great poem series “Twenty Poems for Noelle.” I don't think this is the same Noelle he was talking about, but it is why I borrowed the book.
Her book was good. I liked her free verse poems better than the few in the book that were in form. She had a few sestinas that were pretty good, but there were some awkward lines to make the form work, the same in the couple of rhyming poems.
Kocot has a way of starting with a subject, veering off, and then bringing you back to the subject she presented in the beginning. I like her method.
I like the way Kocot plays with language. There were some poems in the book that didn't make sense to me no matter how much I read them, but the language sounded so good together, that I didn't care. She also wrote narrative poems for the book, and still had a great attention to the sounds of the words.
The stanza breaks were all stanzas with the same amount of lines in the poems, there were some line breaks that ended on weak words (like “because”) instead of stronger words. She capitalizes the first word in every stanza.
About half of her titles were pretty good (“I Want Something of Yours for Comfort When I Sleep”), and half of them were just one word.
I also have another book by Kocot, and I am looking forward to reading it.
Here is a link to 4 poems that are in the book, featured on Reading Between A and B. I especially like “I Want Something of Yours for Comfort When I Sleep,” and “Good Things Come to Those Who Wait.”
I loved this book! I borrowed it from the library and am going to buy a copy.
The book is about Poetry Magazine's first ten years of publishing, with a focus on the founder/editor Harriet Monroe. It wasn't a biography of Monroe, everything about Monroe was in relation to Poetry Magazine.
The book includes lots of quotes from letters to and from Monroe. I really enjoyed reading the poets' letters, and especially the foreign correspondent for the magazine, Ezra Pound. Pound's letters were entertaining, and I am going to find a copy of his letters so I can read more.
It was reassuring to see that poetry was still a struggle then, even for the best poets, and that Poetry Magazine struggled as well.
I would like to read more about Poetry Magazine's history and Harriet Monroe's biography, but I was glad that this book focused on just the one subject so it could go into it in depth.
I feel like David Rivard is too fancy a poet for me. He has a complicated way of saying things. I just could not connect with his style. Here are some lines in one poem “all the encodings of the glandular having been prioritized.” I can figure it out, but by the time I understand, I forget the context of the lines. Normally, I don't mind if it is hard to figure out because of a concept or wordplay, but I think it is hard to figure out because he reverses word/sentence order, or because it too many vague sanitized words in one sentence. He also pairs specific brand names or products in poems with a lot of vague language, so I only remember the specific brands. Even though it is a whole poem, I only remember it as a sort of shopping list.
In about half of Rivard's poems, he breaks his lines in a way that scatters them throughout the page, which contributes to my problems following his poems.
I heard him read a couple months ago, and enjoyed the reading, but this book was just okay. I am going to see if I can find some more recent work at the library.
I liked this collection of poems better than Life Studies. The poems were looser because although they were sonnets, they weren't the formal types that he wrote earlier in his poetry. They were more friendly, although I feel like all Lowell's poems have a stuffiness to them.
Adrienne Rich called this book “one of the most vindictive and mean-spirited acts in the history of poetry.” Lowell used direct quotes from his ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick's private letters to him. It is pretty selfish of Lowell to use Hardwick's letters like that. Hardwick really opened herself up in these letters, and I felt kind of guilty reading them. I actually enjoyed the writing in the poems written by Hardwick better than the ones Lowell wrote. I haven't read anything by Hardwick, but I want to read her now.
This book is part of my reading local writers project–Lowell was born and grew up in Boston, and lived here as an adult too.
My favorites in the book:
Double Vision
The Couple
Communication
This took me awhile to read because I have less reading time because I am working extra hours. I miss my reading time!
This book is loosely a part of my Reading Local Writers Project, because only because the only time Zapruder lived in Massachusetts is when he got his MFA at University of Massachusetts, Amhearst.
I like Zapruder's shorter poems better than the longer ones because they are more “on topic.” The longer ones tended to have lines that were all over the page, which I found distracting at times. I could not see why Zapruder chose to have some poems left justified, and chose to have others with spread out lines.
I liked Zapruder's playful subjects and unusual connections between images.
The book includes 5 parts. Three of the parts include general poems, one part is the long title poem, “The Pajamist,” and one part is a series of poems called “Twenty Poems for Noelle.”
The poems for Noelle were my favorite. All of them were sweet and complimentary towards the subject, and included her name in each of the poems. There were times that I wasn't sure exactly how she related to the poem's subject, but I still liked the poems.
I also liked the title poem. It was a thick long poem with a lot of whimsy and creative ideas. I really like poems like this.
I am going to check out more Zapruder poems, and I am going to pick up a copy of this book, because I got it from the library. (Whenever I get poetry books from the library, I always end up buying them anyway!)
My favorites from the book:
Canada
There is a Light (second poem from top)
Andale Mono
Twenty Poems for Noelle
(Dara Wier is a writer who lives in Massachusetts. I am currently working on a project to read more local writers).
This way I feel about this book is pretty similar to the previous review I wrote for Remnants of Hannah. Her poetry is consistent, although I think her writing is more interchangeable in Hat On a Pond. What I mean by interchangeable, is there are many lines in each of the poems that are great, but I feel like they are not exactly together in the poem. I feel like any of the lines could be mixed up with other lines from other poems in the book and still work equally as well. It is not like this in all the poems, but it is there. I didn't notice this problem in the other book. The poems make surprising connections and the images are beautiful, but I don't feel like these poems are as individuals.
Wier still has great titles, fun line breaks. Again, most of her poems are one stanza. She capitalizes the first letter of every line, and it is my slight preference when poets capitalize the first word of the sentence instead.
My favorite poems in the book:
Ideographic
Instances of Wasted Ingenuity
Portrait of Me by a Melancholy Man
Eye Lost in a Viewfinder
Dara Wier is a local poet. Since I haven't been in Massachusetts long, I am trying to do what I can to make myself feel at home. Part of that is that I'm going to try to read local poets and authors. I started my project with with Dara Wier.I heard a couple of poems at a reading we were both involved in, and I liked the poems. I also heard one of her poems on the Poetry magazine audio site. The one on the audio site is Holidays was good, but it was kind of generic and not representative of Wier's work. It wasn't as weirdly delightful as the poems in [b:Remnants of Hannah 133063 Remnants of Hannah Dara Wier http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172016164s/133063.jpg 128183]. The titles are great: “It Wasn't Exactly Like Being Left Standing at the Altar,” “Of Houses I've Inhabited Forever Without Knowing” “A Search for an Opposite Inescapable Conclusion.” There is a poem called “Prose Poem,” which, of course, has line breaks. There is a poem called “A Thousand Words,” that has the words marked throughout the poem.I enjoy poems with a sense of humor, and these poems are funny. They aren't laugh out loud funny, I would call them more clever and/or surprising. I found myself surprised with her images and the connections she makes. I read another review of the book, and the reviewer said her book [b:Reverse Rapture 1093245 Reverse Rapture Dara Wier http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1180920871s/1093245.jpg 1080061] was much better. I am going to check it out because I really enjoyed Remnants of Hannah.I borrowed this book from the library, but I think I will probably buy a copy because I'd like to read the book through again.My favorites:Of Houses I've Inhabited Forever Without Knowing (the poem is about half way down the page)Clairsentient GoatAttitude of RagsEye CagesI had a really hard time finding poems from the book. Almost all my favorites aren't online, but here is one that is good: Double Sonnet