Feast your eyes and your shelves on Augustâs
SPD Recommends *Backlist*,
ten titles that continue to rock our world. Maybe theyâll rock yours tooâŠ
1. Poems of the Black Object - Ronaldo Wilson
"[A] warning to anyone tempted to believe that in objectification lies freedom. Livid inside an apocalyptic negative capability, these poems are constructed through their maker's deconstruction, and reading, I too, felt unmade."âClaudia Keelan
2. Sherwood Forest - Camille Roy
"In its capacity to stop time, SHERWOOD FOREST opens its reader to a future made âsuddenly visible.â A ânarrationâ that's both âdesireâ and what incubates it: the capacity to âfloat.â Imagine a forest floating in the air. Camille Roy does this. She is a writer who lets her reader dream, past tree-line. Where the sentences flare and dim, like 'sexy bodies.' Like a memory of touch. Like âbody partsâ and 'tissue' - a luminous genitalia - above a pond."âBhanu Kapil
3. Maribor - Demosthenes Agafiotis
"MARIBOR gives us both artifactâof the ephemera of communication, institutions, powerâas well as blueprint for imagining an 'alphabet of the future.' A master of the contemporary hermetic, Agrafiotis can bring to light in one stroke both the evanescence and endurance of the writing on the wall."âEleni Stecopoulos
4. Hurdis Addo - Samantha Giles
"Conceptual poetics + wed to + a dedication to social justice = a book with sharp edges and intriguing reading dynamics. Definitely recommended." â Kevin Killian
5. The Lizard Club - Steve Abbot
"Steve Abbot's THE LIZARD CLUB is funny, angry, suspenseful and totally new. It's like a Xerox of tragedy, Pandora without her box. Read it and feel your tongue growing and growing until you can flick flies out of the air."âKevin Killian.
6. Inter Arma - Lauren Shufran
"Laura Shufran's meter-making argument stings with ludic blows bent to send the line aquiver. Weaponized with duck soup and chicken rimes (a baker's dozen haptic hexes of heptameter), INTER ARMA is the neoclassical nude formalism that the times demand. With searing wit and virtuosic Ă©lan, Shufran's epic lyrics hit homers every time."âCharles Bernstein
7. Haecceities - Michael Cross
"In HAECCEITIES, Michael Cross has made an interim language, his invention a relation between the wordsâas if this unknown relation or 'noumenon' is 'a hide enthinned' of futuristic Elizabethan single words each at once tactile, optical, aural simultaneously traces and events of reinterpreted future-present spurred in 'the many hundred wing-lit hives'"âLeslie Scalapino.
8. C.C. - Tyrone Williams
"Slanging each other we drift apart. Maybe there is a war outside. Will web sites continue to explode? The poems in C.C. are tense, troubled, intricately terse. In this powerful collection Tyrone Williams explores the boundaries between poetry, politics, and history."âSusan Howe
9. Negativity - Jocelyn Saidenberg
"'Rejecting that which cannot be recaptured' makes negativity prelude to a form of freedom, and the psychosexual progress Saidenbergâs pilgrim traces from 'Destruction as a Cause of Becoming' to the knotty resolve of CARNAL achieves a âmusic of exhaust and darkening horizonsâ thatâs entirely the poetâs own: 'Figures retie the circle, then release into shape.ââ âRodney Koeneke
10. Democracy Is Not for the People - Josef Kaplan
"This book works exactly as I expected (of course you have to use as directed). I was very happy with my purchase, and with the cop being on fire. I am not sure we should mug the wealthy, of course." âDiana Hamilton