Month: November 2008
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Prairie Style by C.S. GiscombeDalkey Archive Press, 2008
These prose-poems are about the idea of “inland,” the idea of the prairie: location, self and voice (and race) and what that means in a given place, metaphor, juxtaposition, repetition. (“What’s your body in the set of places?” one poem asks (p 23).) These poems are full of “foxes,” the fact of the animals but…
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The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. MerwinCopper Canyon Press, 2008
This is a book of quiet poems, quiet beauty: there’s something of magic and majesty in Merwin’s descriptions of stars, birds, planets, rivers, in phrases like “the green heart of the woods” (p 13). These are poems concerned with memory, with family, with nature, with sight—perhaps mostly with memory: “here surfacing through the long/backlight of…
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Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn and David LevithanAlfred A. Knopf, 2008 (originally 2006)
I am such a sucker for city-romances like this, and also for David Levithan’s particular post-gay brand of optimism and charm, and also for the occasional slightly-breathless young adult novel. “I know this is going to sound strange, but would you mind being my girlfriend for the next five minutes?” is how Nick and Norah’s…
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Selected Poems by Frank O’HaraEdited by Mark FordAlfred A. Knopf, 2008
When I like Frank O’Hara’s poems, I like them lots, yet I didn’t like this book as a whole as much as I’d expected to. What I like best are his shorter and more straightforward poems, his “I do this I do that” poems, as he called them. I like “Walking to Work” and “Music”…
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Up All Night: A Short Story Collection by Peter Abrahams, Libba Bray, David Levithan, et al.Harper Teen, 2008
While I enjoyed this collection of six short stories about nighttime epiphanies, by Peter Abrahams, Libba Bray, David Levithan, Patricia McCormick, Sarah Weeks, and Gene Luen Yang, I definitely liked some of the individual stories more than others. Part of it, I think, is the length factor, or the intended-audience factor: I like short short…