Poetry may be a subculture, but it’s one that is producing an enormous amount of work. Since the Atlantic published Dana Gioia’s much-quoted essay, “Can Poetry Matter?” in 1991, many of his observations remain true: the number of literary journals, publishers, poets, and creative writing programs continues to expand. At the same time, general coverage of all of this poetry has declined, such as reviews in daily newspapers (which are also disappearing) and other review publications.

On the other hand, the last twenty years have seen the rise of young people’s involvement in performance poetry, an explosion of poetry on the Internet, and the populist instincts and attentions of active US Poet Laureates: notably Robert Pinsky and Billy Collins. Garrison Keillor’s daily five-minute radio program, The Writer’s Almanac, has done much to make poetry available to radio listeners.

All of this vigor notwithstanding, choosing contemporary poetry titles has become increasingly difficult due to the lack of review coverage. Chain bookstore shelves tend to be filled with the same old stuff—poets whose names even non-readers will recognize. Old masters, like Whitman or Dickinson, are timeless treasures, no doubt, but they aren’t a substitute for a well thought-out contemporary collection.

Undoubtedly, poetry remains a vital part of a lettered life—its rhythms teach the fundamentals of language, its images draw attention to beauty, and its distilled insights are not to be found anywhere else. And in this digital age, the sustained attention that poetry requires may be one of our only opportunities to derive the benefits that come with “deep reading,” as Nicolas Carr puts it. So then, how does one choose the next great book?

One approach is to keep tabs on what’s coming out from the many fine presses that publish poetry with care. We selected a few to indicate the breadth and quality of what’s being published across the continent (and across the sea), from both venerable and upstart presses. Our reviewers looked at a year’s worth of books from each press, and chose just one title to review. Enjoy these books and presses, but be aware, there are plenty more whence these came. Teresa Scollon

Flinch of Song

Jennifer Militello

Tupelo Press

Softcover $16.95 (72pp)

978-1-932195-76-7

Tupelo Press released its first five books in 2001; now it boasts a catalog of varied styles. Consider the range represented by four names: Gary Soto, Floyd Skloot, Dan Beachy-Quick, and G.C. Waldrep. Equally diverse is the list of Tupelo’s Annual First Book Award winners. Jennifer Militello is the most recent addition to that list, and her Flinch of Song is a discovery.

For Militello, things are always something else. A parade of metaphors reveals Militello as a storehouse of fitting and extraordinary conjugations. At times, tenor and vehicle dance the Enchufla, taking each other’s place.

I had the clock in my hands + I went through the door + the day was
lightning + the door was a clock

time held you like water time did not hold me + the clock was a
door I went through + without you time was water +

Time becomes water. Sadnesses ungather and then become boats. Concepts materialize. Appropriately, the word “manifestation” takes prominence in this book. In several different poems, each titled “Manifestation,” Militello incarnates the imponderable.

This is a book of things, and Militello favors nouns commonly associated with beauty—flowers, rivers, light, horses. But these become uncommon, imbued with a sense of raggedness. These nouns are spoken with a laborious urgency. As such, when Militello writes, “I broke my throat with // trying to say,” she is believed. (2009) Janelle Adsit

The Real Warnings

Rhett Iseman Trull

Anhinga Press

Softcover $15.00 (94pp)

978-1-934695-11-1

Since 1976, Tallahassee-based Anhinga Press has been publishing poetry, much of it rooted in its home state. Its first publications were chapbooks of exclusively Florida poets. In 1981, the press expanded to publish poets of other origins, and two years later the Anhinga Prize for Poetry was established. The 2008 winner is Rhett Iseman Trull’s The Real Warnings, a collection that is a new life—like its first poem describes—screaming into the world.

Loud with humor, though still earnest, Trull is able to occupy the minds of people who ride school buses. She writes to the “fat girl at the bus stop who bleaches / her mustache” and asks, “Let us launch our hopes / behind the talisman of your unibrow.” Although present to the moment of youth, this is not a young book. The work is fully developed, offering a past that fiercely outlasts itself.

With neither nostalgia nor sentimentality, Trull establishes love as able. It’s a force that can bend onlookers, and yet, “Love. What is it / but protection from being a wallflower / or being seated between strangers on a plane?” The book is as practical as it is whimsical. Trull includes a love spell recipe and a set of—extraordinary, yet still useful—baby names for expectant parents (“Call him Granite, Argonaut, Thievery-Slick.”).

Poetry can do anything for Trull. A glance through her contents page confirms this, with titles like “Instructions on How to Leave Me” and “This Poem is Begging for Help.” What else is poetry capable of? Look to Trull. (2009) Janelle Adsit

Writing the Silences

Richard O. Moore

University of California Press

Softcover $19.95 (136pp)

978-0-520-26244-7

The University of California Press was established in 1893. Its dedication to poetry reflects its age and, perhaps, the reason for its longevity: it pays as much attention to poetry of the recent and remote past as to innovative contemporary poetry by up-and-coming writers. A fair amount of the poetry published by the UC Press is part of its New California Poetry series. A newer series, “Poets for the Millennium,” offers book-length selections of poems by important but often overlooked poets like Nicole Brossard and José Lezama Lima.

A recent UC Press publication that seems to exemplify all the diverse aspects of the press’s commitment to poetry is a collection by Richard O. Moore, titled Writing the Silences. Moore, one of the last surviving members of the San Francisco Literary Renaissance Circle, has been writing since around 1940; this collection represents selections of his work from 1946 to 2008. Much of Moore’s work really does complement the surrounding silences, and merits favorable comparison to Robert Creeley’s economic verse. Moore was an extremely reticent California poet who might have gone unnoticed even while writing in the twenty-first century, but for UC Press’s commitment to honoring the poetry of the past and present. (April) Dan Coffey

Echo Train

Aaron Fagan

Salt Publishing

Softcover $14.95 (80pp)

978-1-84471-749-1

Like his debut collection, Garage, Aaron Fagan’s Echo Train is a short book of short poems. Its full page of epigraphs—from Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Hayden Carruth—makes it look like a child facing an adult on a see-saw. And yet, like a string-theorist positing extra dimensions, Fagan somehow evens the equation. With lines of roughly equal length, widespread enjambment rarely employed for obvious semantic effects, and a fondness for unexpected turns of phrase and grammar, the typical Fagan poem has a powerful forward flow, trailing whirlpools of complexity. Although these techniques can seem capricious, or create moments of impenetrability, at their most successful they illumine the depths of disaffection with flashes of dark wit. Idle speculation, outrageous tall tales, and declarations of love to unknown women from the street somehow harmonize with vast perspectives opened by metaphysical riffing on the moon, sun, and stars. The book’s most uncanny imaginings—the sea of TVs glimpsed from a plane, the boulders mysteriously crawling across the desert—recall the satirical mini-nightmares of Stephen Crane. Though its strange lurches in rhythm and thought-pattern sometimes sound like a radio seeking a station, Echo Train’s unusual linguistic and imaginative vitality make it well worth reading.

Salt Publishing was founded in 1999 by John Kinsella, Clive Newman, and Chris Hamilton-Emery as an offshoot of Kinsella’s Australia-based Salt magazine. Since relocating to the UK in 2002, it carries on the magazine’s original vision, promoting a diverse range of literature from across the English-speaking world and beyond. (March) Paul Franz

Patient Frame

Steven Heighton

House of Anansi

Softcover $14.95 (112pp)

978-0-88784-952-7

When a line in this fifth collection by Steven Heighton calls a poem a “vespiary”—a wasps’ nest—it aptly describes its author’s best poems: buzzing swarms of activity, where each word stings. Like the Roman Horace—among the foreign poets translated in this book’s final section—the Greek-Canadian Heighton is a relentless innovator. Rarely employing the same form twice, his technique ranges from sonnets to prose poetry, yet he favors eclectic open forms held taut by complex sonic patterning. Personal and historical narratives, narratives based on current events, disturbing dream visions, a hallucinatory language experiment voiced by a doomed deer: these are some of his inroads into love, death, and connection, his elemental themes. Condemning cruelty and indifference, these poems exhort the reader to passionate engagement with the world. Some clichés remain: a heart “lilts,” sex is an “aching sacrament,” and baseball, once again, becomes the favorite pastime of philosophers. But the book’s weaker points reflect its virtues. For all its burnished intricacy, Heighton’s is not the negative art of eliminating imperfection, but rather the positive art of seeking closer approximations to life. Thematic urgency and a prevailing freshness of content and technique make Patient Framean exciting collection.

Named for the storytelling spider of West African mythology, Toronto’s House of Anansi was founded in 1967 by poet Dennis Lee and writer David Godfrey. Long the home of important Canadian poetry, fiction, and philosophy, including translations of French-Canadian authors, it holds an increasingly prominent place among Canadian independent presses. (April) Paul Franz

Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry

Camille T. Dungy, editor

University of Georgia Press

Hardcover $69.95 (378pp)

978-0-8203-3277-2

Softcover $24.95 (378pp)

978-0-8203-3431-8

African American poets are under-represented in nature and eco-poetry anthologies, not because they aren’t writing poems about nature, but because they often engage with the natural world in different ways than the traditional Western canon. “The pastoral as diversion, a construction of a culture that dreams, through landscape and animal life, of a certain luxury or innocence, is less prevalent,” Camille T. Dungy writes in her thoughtful introduction to this new anthology. For one thing, African Americans often write as “workers of the field,” people with an intimate knowledge of the earth, rather than as onlookers. For another, from this perspective, while a landscape may be beautiful, it is not innocent: it has been the setting of and witness to violent oppression. Lucille Clifton, in the poem that serves as the book’s epigraph, writes, “why / is there under that poem always / an other poem?”

Dungy’s selection of poems is an invitation to read far beyond these pages. The poems are organized thematically, each section preceded by a short prose piece to illuminate a particular theme. The work of ninety-three poets, from Phillis Wheatley to Patricia Smith, Richard Wright to Tim Seibles, shows a range of concerns that will broaden our understanding of what constitutes nature poetry. This is an important addition to a library or personal collection.

The University of Georgia Press was founded in 1938 and is nationally known for its literary publications, competitions, and series, including the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the National Poetry Series, and the VQR Poetry Series. Its interest in African American literature and environmental studies make it the perfect match for this book. (2009) Teresa Scollon

Flood Song

Sherwin Bitsui

Copper Canyon Press

Softcover $15.00 (120pp)

978-1-55659-308-6

In Sherwin Bitsui’s second book, his Dine (Navajo) heritage informs the particular consciousness of this book-length poem-song.

Sherwin Bitsui draws from the Dine language and landscape to create a third sensibility when it melds with the English. It is in that other realm that we find him scanning a desert territory, perhaps as certain birds do—vultures, hawks—reciting the evidence of what is found there, both natural and urban, cherished and despised. He finds bones, blood, gas, wrens, and television snow. His is an aching and spare, hypnotically lyrical singing. “I sang until the sun rose. // The shadows of my face grew into a swallow with folded wings and darted into the fire. // A cloud wanted to slip through the coal mines and unleash its horses. // It wanted to crack open bulldozers and spray their yolk over the hills so that a new / birth cry would awaken the people who had fallen asleep.”

Part of the enjoyment of such a book is the sustained quality of the voice at attention; though replete with syntactical quandaries, incomplete thoughts and images, the duration of the song provides the reader time to reconsider and return, like a bird circling back to the place of its birth.

Flood Song is offered by the nonprofit Copper Canyon Press which has been dedicated to poetry and books about poetry since it was founded in 1972 with $500 and some heady enthusiasm on the part of Sam Hamill and Tree Swenson. Its mission has always been to advance the work of well-respected and emerging poets, and to make available important, formerly out-of-print classics. Their catalogue includes Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, and many of the country’s most esteemed literary elders. (2009) Holly Wren Spaulding

Orange Crush

Simone Muench

Sarabande Books

Softcover $14.95 (96pp)

978-1-932511-79-6

Deftly associative and full of the heat that is a woman’s voice in the fire of its own making, Simone Muench’s third collection considers the history of a class of seventeenth-century women who came to be known as “Orange Girls,” characters circumscribed by the fact of their femaleness such that they were left to the margins of polite society where they sold oranges and themselves outside theater entrances.

The collection is also an homage to Muench’s influences and literary friends—those she recasts as modern orange girls who’ve recouped some of the power lost during previous generations. Through her colorful accounts, we meet self-possessed women with attitude, imagination, and the force of their own will which, in one section, is portrayed as a sexy stage revue. “With her topaz neck and her bestiary lure. With her coloratura and vixen gene, she goes down. Into the musk and hum and howl.” In another poem, the poet asks, “Is desire a viral captivity? Or, a tender pour / of milk into an infinite glass?” This question hovers in the background as she writes about death, illness, sex, and girlhood. The women in these poems are marked and sometimes damaged, but not only and not always; they unfurl in the world with their own reason for being.

Orange Crush is published by Sarabande Books, a nonprofit press based in Kentucky and founded in 1994 with a catalogue dedicated to poetry, short fiction, and literary nonfiction. They also publish a chapbook series. (February) Holly Wren Spaulding

Harmless

Myra Sklarew

Mayapple Press

Softcover $15.95 (85pp)

978-0-932412-89-8

In the title poem of her seventh book, Myra Sklarew argues with a Polish sculptor who says that art “opens our brains to imagining.” The poet wants what she can imagine because it makes possible what is sometimes impossible: “In this poem I ask that the transport / of frozen children / be transformed, that / in the morning when they come to unlock / the ice-covered door, from each golden / chrysalis / a living child will emerge. / That the artist, between dreaming / and reality, opens our eyes and places / before us / twenty girls, intact.” Each poem is haunted—either a little or a lot—by the horrors of the twentieth century, and especially by the Jewish experience during and after World War II. Sklarew’s is a poetry that asks questions of experience, that probes these accounts for morality, meaning, explanation.

Hers is also a poetry informed by science—Sklarew studied biology and genetics, and has done work on trauma and memory—and is woven throughout with observations about the natural world, the Old Testament and Torah, war, and Jewish customs. Addressing an Amanita, a kind of mushroom, the poet concludes: “The amanita has no need for speech. She stands / like a sentinel in the garden: venomous, / unsolicited, provisional as memory.”

Present throughout these poems is a question often asked by poets: can these words matter or mean anything given what is known about the world? The poet recognizes a power in her utterance and yet remains uncertain and curious, still anxious for it to do its work in the world, perhaps even to heal.

Published by Mayapple Press, a Michigan-based independent publisher since 1978, Harmless fits snugly into that press’s mission to publish, among other things, books of poetry by women about the immigrant experience (including Judaica and the Caribbean diaspora). Mayapple also publishes books about the Great Lakes and bilingual editions of poetry in translation, some fiction and nonfiction, with about ten to sixteen titles appearing in a given year. (May) Holly Wren Spaulding

Beautiful in the Mouth

Keetje Kuipers

BOA Editions

Softcover $16.00 (96pp)

978-1-934414-33-0

From the house that first published then unknown poet Li-Young Lee, Carolyn Kizer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Yin, and W.D. Snodgrass’s critically acclaimed collection, The Fuhrer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress, comes the award-winning first book by Keetje Kuipers. Winnner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, Beautiful in the Mouth is a haunting collection that dances so intimately with the dead, it is difficult to separate the dead from the living, their bodies are so fused.

The poems move like ghosts themselves: disappearing into walls, circling back, appearing for a moment to be captured, then evaporating into the air. Kuipers pins moments onto the page with the care of an etymologist collecting rare specimens. Her poems are at once visceral and cosmic, “a wave as well as a particle.”

In “Memorial Day” she writes, “I pass a field where black and white heifers glow in the just-dead sun like / chess pieces forgotten and abandoned mid-game.” It is her exceptional craft, and a dizzying unfolding of images that seduces readers to follow her deep into the place where suddenly, they find, they too are lost. From New York City to Montana, trailer park bars to hospital beds, Kuipers’ haunting work makes the reader mark the pages, mark the lines, maybe even mark the publishing house that gathers so much together, as into a cardboard box, this remarkable lost and found. (April) Jen Sperry Steinorth

View from a Temporary Window

Joanie Mackowski

University of Pittsburgh Press

Softcover $14.95 (72pp)

978-0-8229-6055-3

While many people worry about gaining weight or going bald, the population of Joanie Mackowski’s poetry embraces corporal changes. Of course, instead of getting paunch, these characters turn into cars, shed their skin, and grow hands the size of platters. To be sure, these are not your everyday metamorphoses. In fact, the first poem of View from a Temporary Window asks, “That the hole in my skull never quite grows over / with mosses or brick.” Because, Mackowski adds, “there’s too much to know.” This openness allows for the leaps essential to poetry.

University of Pittsburgh Press poets are innovators of language, always surprising, but craftsmen at heart. Like Mackowski, Barbara Hamby and Bob Hicok, for example, are rooted in the fundamentals (they know how to write a stunner of a line), and these fundamentals allow them to range, limitless. To say that Mackowski’s poems are imaginative misses the point; they belong to their own world, a world at once grotesque and wonderful. It is almost funny that Mackowski’s most used image is a cloud, more likely to be associated with daydreams than nightmares. Perhaps she is emphasizing that clouds are misunderstood, are changeable and potentially dangerous, just like her characters, one of whom is vast enough to eat heaven: “For dessert, the nearest / piece of sky, iced with a creamy sheen / of cloud, and in time I’ll eat my own tongue, my own eye, / whatever you feel for me, and whatever you’re about to say.” (January) Erica Wright

Janelle Adsit has published poetry, book reviews, and essays in a variety of venues such as Confrontation, Caketrain, Mid-American Review, and Colorado Review. She is a contributor to multiple academic anthologies including (In)Scribing Gender: International Female Writers and the Creative Process (Diversion Press). http://janelleadsit.com

Dan Coffey is an Associate Professor and Languages and Literatures Librarian at Iowa State University. He also publishes the podcast Papers for the Border, found at http://pftb.libsyn.com.

Paul Franz is a freelance writer and editor. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

Holly Wren Spaulding is the author of the chapbook The Grass Impossibly (Michigan Writers Cooperative Press). She is the literary editor at The Dunes Review.

Jen Sperry Steinorth is the author of the chapbook Forking the Swift (Michigan Writers Cooperative Press) and a licensed builder, designer, and co-owner of a small green building company in northern Michigan.

Erica Wright is the author of the forthcoming collection Instructions for Killing the Jackal (Black Lawrence Press) and the chapbook Silt (Dancing Girl Press). She is the Poetry Editor at Guernica Magazine.