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Captain Poetry’s Sucker Punch: A Guide to the Homeric Punkhole, 1980–2012 by Kenneth Warren
Critical ThinkingCalled by Andrei Codrescu, “one of the few and great readers of American poetry,” Warren presents in this collection of more than one hundred essays an interactive history of poetic aspirations and punk protrusions. With a mytho-poetic, archetypal way of reading community, music, and poetry, Warren is a provocative exegete of humanity's typological inheritance.$20.00 -
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Changing Tense: Thirty memento mori by Bruce Jackson
Critical Thinking, New ReleasesBruce Jackson has written thirty memorial essays about his many friends, ranging from famous philosophers like Michel Foucault, to stray dogs like Randolph Scott, with a host of poets in between.$24.00 -
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Cloud of Witnesses by Linda Norton
Critical Thinking, New Releases, PoetryLike W. E. B. Du Bois finding solace in his library, Norton moves back and across “the color line,” sits with Shakespeare, Fanny Howe, James Joyce, Toni Morrison, etc., and they wince not, welcoming her into their esteemed company. —Tyrone Williams
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Ephemera 1995-2022: On people, politics, art, justice, torture, and war by Bruce Jackson
Critical Thinking, New Releases, SuperstarsBruce Jackson’s Ephemera finishes his recent triplicate of essay collections. This one, which starts with an almost breezy account of his own near heart-attack, feels as undeniable as his Places and Changing Tense.—Benj DeMott$22.00 -
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For the Ordinary Artist Short Reviews, Occasional Pieces and More by Bill Berkson
Critical Thinking"Opinions are not literature" Gertrude Stein famously admonished Ernest Hemingway. It's a maxim that puts most art critics behind the Eight-Ball. Not Bill Berkson. His criticism doesn't just deliver an opinion, it embodies an experience, matching the texture and plasticity of visual forms with a vividness and suppleness of language that gives the reader something shapely and immediate to respond to thereby opening path ways in the mind to the image or object being evoked and judged. His subject is art; his essays and critical prose poems are uncommonly graceful literary artifacts. —Robert Storr$16.00 -
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Gerald Locklin: A Critical Introduction
Critical ThinkingI am most happy to say that this book celebrates the poet Gerald Locklin. It is an homage to Gerald Locklin, a poet whose neck of the woods is the literary underground, which is the publishing stratum that has delivered Howl and The Maximus Poems and Ulysses and The Making of Americans and Flower Fist and Bestial Wail. Not a bad list. His is a forceful, absolutely clear and democratic voice that constantly reminds all of us in the realm of the poem that our poetry is all of us who make all of our poetry. —Michael Basinski$25.00 -
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How Proust Ruined My Life and Other Essays by Gloria Frym
Critical ThinkingIn this wonderful assemblage of essays, Gloria Frym liberates the act of reading from the confines of the page. She leads us into the open air where the personal and the public intersect and create a new avenue of possibilities: the book in the hand, the world outside your window. Especially memorable are the probing essays on Jean Toomer and Lorine Niedecker, and her homage to David Meltzer. How Proust Ruined My Life is a timeless book and deserves a wide audience. --Lewis Warsh$22.00 -
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In Perfect Silence at the Stars: Walt Whitman and the Meaning of Poems by Nick Courtright
Critical Thinking, PoetryWith In Perfect Silence at the Stars, the art of close-reading becomes an experience without limits. This is an exhilarating book. ~ Donald Revell
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MemeWars by Aldon Lynn Nielsen With E. Ethelbert Miller
Critical Thinking, New Releases, PoetryAs you begin Memewars, think of Ethelbert Miller’s leading questions as melodies, recognizable tunes, and Nielsen’s responses as harmolodic extensions, waxing nostalgic, and just as moving, just as important, playing all the changes on a prolific career and life in music and writing. —Tyrone Williams
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Mind Over Matter by Gloria Frym
Critical Thinking, SuperstarsHow does the present imprint itself on language, on poetry? Gloria Frym's Mind Over Matter shows us that: the outlines of the endless wars, the credit default swaps. But it also shows poetry resisting this. "No poem/would stand for such a line." Frym writes. "A poem is not a fool." This book makes me want to cheer. —Rae Armantrout$16.00 -
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Oops! Environmental Poetics by James Sherry
Critical ThinkingCan we find models for environmental writing in "language" poetry? What do poetry and risk management have in common? Can hierarchy be inclusive? Why are cross-disciplinary thinking and formal innovation core, non-mutually exclusive tasks for environmental writing today? Sherry's thoughtful, resourceful, playful poetics, as methodical as they are experimental, will challenge you to rethink many of your assumptions about writing, the environment, poetry. This is a substantial, and key, addition to the conversation. –Jonathan Skinner, editor ecopoetic$18.00 -
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Robert Creeley on the Poet’s Work in conversation with & photographs by Bruce Jackson
Critical Thinking, Poetry, SuperstarsThis is an edited transcript of a conversation about the work poets do that Robert Creeley and Bruce Jackson held in Robert Creeley’s home—a converted firehouse in Buffalo’s Black Rock district— the morning of September 6, 2001.$16.00 -
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Sauvage: Essays on Anglophone Poetry by Richard Owens
Critical ThinkingBroad in scale and scope, this volume attends to developments on the terrain of contemporary Anglophone poetry deeply articulated with issues of balance, justice, measure, and distance as these variously cohere, come apart and recombine across the unfolding present. Decentered and transatlantic in orientation, the essays aggregated in this volume emerge from a variety of social contexts, including the popular and the scholarly, print and digital forums, the cosmopolitan and the local, the center and the margin.$18.00 -
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Such Conjunctions: Robert Duncan, Jess, and Alberto de Lacerda
Critical Thinking, SuperstarsAfter meeting in November 1969 at the International Festival of Poetry in Austin, Texas, the Portuguese poet Alberto de Lacerda (1928-2007) developed a trans-Atlantic friendship with the San Francisco poet Robert Duncan (1919-1988) and his partner, the artist Jess (1923-2004). This book celebrates that friendship by bringing together from the Duncan and de Lacerda archives reproductions and transcriptions of all their extant correspondence in addition to the many inscribed publications, books, magazines, photographs, poems, drawings, and artwork that they shared with each other.$28.00 -
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The Woman with a Million Hearts by Loren Kleinman
Critical ThinkingLoren Kleinman brings a poet's sensibility to her captivating memoir that is at once serious and sly, self-deprecating and a powerful declaration of self. Her memoir is less about memory than it is a fine-tuned, near magical consideration of the small details that ultimately make manifest the large passions of her life. Her edgy meditations are a bit like a delicately rendered Lost and Found for the great grab bag of human experience--instantly relatable, brash, intimate and true. —Rita Gabis, author of A Guest At The Shooters' Banquet$16.00