In this first retrospective of Jarnot’s work, language’s power to transform the self is, through repetition, enacted: “I am clinging to the baked goods and the liquor store, I am nearly Spanish and then nearly other things, I am cutting you with broken glass.” Balancing a honed, poised modern lyric with postmodern playfulness—in the vein of sometimes Stein (“tractor/ of chinchilla, chili of chinchilla, chill of the/ chinchilla, crosswalk of chinchilla of the dawn”), sometimes Stevens (“Inside of my inspection house there are/ things I am inside of lacking only linens/ and the tiniest of birds, there are small ideas/ of tiny birds and things they are inside of“)—it’s clear that Jarnot’s earlier multimedia poetic experiments inform later poems, where each word or phrase is treated as an ingredient, accruing potency in quantity, some acting as generative hooks, lengthening and deepening a poem’s breath (“how terrific it is to be/ misled inside a hallway, and how terrific it is/ to be the hallway as it stands inside the house”), others as fixed points to keep us, in the dizzying dream logic of these riveting, long-winded works, balanced. Reading this work is truly a joy. (May)

Reviewed on 05/24/2013 | Details & Permalink

Martin served with the U.S. Army in Iraq between 2003 and 2005; his solid, sad verse debut chronicles that experience, along with the months before and the years after. Stateside training generates some of his strangest, harshest poems, including a prose anecdote that might describe a murder. Time back at home, in snowy Ohio, prompts alienated, ambivalent regret, comparable at best to Randall Jarrell’s poems on World War II airmen and veterans. Yet the bulk of the book, and its reason for being, involve Martin’s time in Iraq. Sand gets everywhere, IEDs could be anywhere, children are sources at once of pathos and danger, and camaraderie is all-important. “We avoid trash, disturbed soil, animal carcasses./ We arrest men// who dig beside the road./ We hate the ground.” Some pages portray other soldiers, grim, friendly, naive: “Smith, shirtless, curls forty-pound dumbbells,/ part of his plan for home:// a sex life.” Other sentences take on the scenes and the moments of combat: “You aim. Your first shot./ But the truck slows. When you adjust, your foot slips,/ you fall below the edge, unable to see.” Now a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, Martin breaks little new ground in the craft of verse. What he offers instead—along with the very few other Iraq war poets (Brian Turner, for example) noticed so far—are thoughtful recollections, scary memories, articulate reflections, and the resolve of a man who has been there. (May)

Reviewed on 05/24/2013 | Details & Permalink

Stefans has long enjoyed attention in what might still be called the avant-garde, for his harsh, satirical collage-like verse and for his writings about poetry and new media. This first full-length collection since Stefans’s move from New York to UCLA will renew that attention, and ought to expand it: it’s funnier, stranger and more open than his works so far. Stefans arranges this big collection as if it were a set of chapbooks, with the first section, full of sestinas and sonnets, mocking and reinventing traditional forms: “Pastiche, pretense, parody/ are volleyed back and forth/ silently,” Stefans explains, envisioning readers “buried under the sand in your own inscrutable consequence.” At once sarcastic and friendly, cosmopolitan and capable of surprise, Stefans’s manner recalls Australia’s postmodern master John Tranter, or the English radical poet John Wilkinson. Later segments, at their best, consider Stefans’s move to Los Angeles, “blessed/ by the striations/ of traffic,” where “Practiced avoidance lacks the air of discipline,” or pay coded, punning tributes to institutions (such as the Believer magazine), to frenemies and friends. Less successful pages (including the concluding absurdist playlet) take their cues from the movement called Flarf, in which kitsch, awkwardness, even toilet humor constitute a tongue-in-cheek critique of capitalism: “I found a thong in my television tubes. That time,/ it was getting kind of crazy.” Yet there are emotions behind these strange works, too, from fear of commitment to anxiety over nihilism. (May)

Reviewed on 05/24/2013 | Details & Permalink

Early in this third collection, Olstein (Lost Alphabet) announces: “I am hopeful, and the hopeful seek/ the hopeless, a level always/ in need of rising.” This uncertain balance between hope and hopelessness, fear and fascination, breaks the calm surface of her poems. The book is broken into six sections with a breathing space partway through in the form of a poem constructed of letters to “Sir,” then “Sire” then “Siren.” One of Olstein’s longer pieces, “I Saw a Brand New Look,” softly urges us “to take occasionally/ a bird’s-eye view, to see ourselves moving as if on sped-up film/ like ants through the colonies of their very long short-lives.” The poems are detached, numb at times, and often revert to instructional language to describe situations when instruction is completely ineffective. Olstein uses this inflection as a thin shield against life’s urgency and bewildering circumstance: “On a steamer it’s always/ somebody’s job to steer.” Yet fear peeks through the facade when she writes from the point of view of a rabbit with “wise eyes”: “because prey runs, we learn not to run,/ not to turn our backs or look away/ from the predator we dread and long/ again to see because what we dread most/ is it seeing us without being seen,/ which is almost always the way.” (May)

Reviewed on 05/24/2013 | Details & Permalink

Early in his second collection, Waltz wonders, “that sound haunting /my insomnia, is it you /or your god’s didgeridoo /calling the wild things /home?” Elusive though it may be, this question serves as a spindle around which Waltz’s poems are spun and entwined, as he ultimately finds himself in conversation with two distinct wildernesses—the one he explores and reveres in the natural world, and the one that pushes his imagination toward its whims and vagaries. “The woods walked through us and left a trail,” he writes in “Birds, Still,” and his willingness to follow this unnamed, meandering path (without feeling the terror of having to name it) is one of Waltz’s most alluring poses as a poet. He’s “sorry if the word periwinkle makes you uncomfortable,” but true to the nature of the soothsayer he plays throughout these poems, he wants to assert that “it’s only a word and we mustn’t be afraid of what we know.” But beyond the privilege of a listless and unsettled mind, which doesn’t “know why/ anyone is anyone,” and which Waltz, to his credit, does call into question a handful of times, one occasionally feels that Waltz is perhaps too comfortable in his wilderness, too settled in his tone. Nevertheless, even when he’s standing in hell at the end of his book, where there’s only “one/ season,” Waltz does manage to reassure us that “it’s never /too soon to wear white slacks.” (May)

Reviewed on 05/24/2013 | Details & Permalink

Edwards’s latest—from its cover art to the poems, photographs, and fables inside—is one of the most commanding explorations of travel to arrive in American poetry in a long time, and one whose closest forebear, in light of its lyric chiseling and its philosophical depth, is Elizabeth Bishop’s Questions of Travel. Even after the preciseness of his poems and the impact of his questions, both of which are sustained throughout the collection, Edwards captures the emotional restlessness of the American everyman while moving from one poem to the next with the urgent calm of an international journeyman. “The song of our green-eyed family/ is a song about the bread we bake,” he writes, and then, just a few snapshots later, “You want to paint the world/ you were born into, but when you try// you’re only able to portray this one/ that will kill you.” As his title admits, Edwards is caught between the imperious American inside of him and the poet who needs to remember, to make a record of the beauty he’s witnessed. When he looks hard at America itself and misses “the bright feeling of belonging/ and the familiar patterns of my country,/ its virginity and schizophrenia,/ my several stolen bicycles,” Edwards announces himself as a poet who isn’t here to mine the exotic symbols of the world, but rather to speak to the homelessness that every citizen of the world has felt. (May)

Reviewed on 05/24/2013 | Details & Permalink

Despite its minimalist aesthetic, Davis’s second collection is anything but coy; the poems are slim and brief, but not light. The collection, which begins its considerations of grief and absence with a father’s death and widens outward, is inaugurated with a single conviction: “There is no this or that world.” What follows is a rigorous meditation on this premise, a refusal of the notion that one passes from presence into absence, from life into death, as if by bridge or tunnel. Rather, presence and absence, life and death, coexist—and we are daily challenged to reconcile their simultaneity. Perhaps this is an idea that is best taken small bites, as not to overwhelm; the poem “Addendum” is simply: “Who was it said: ‘AND/ is the greatest/ miracle’? Praise// be his/her name.” And yet, the poems overwhelm, overflow with syntactic attempts to embody the slipperiness of coming to terms with the paradoxical mass of an absent thing, the weight of the hole. These poems are as conspicuously minimal as they are unsuspectingly heavy, and it is by achieving both of these effects at once that they prove that we and our grief are blessed to occupy the same space.

Reviewed on 05/24/2013 | Details & Permalink

A growing number of suicides start looking like murder in Billingham’s absorbing 11th novel featuring Det. Insp. Tom Thorne (after 2012’s The Demands). With the apparent joint suicide of an elderly London couple, Thorne, who’s no longer with the CID, senses something amiss but can’t pinpoint what. His suspicions are met with ridicule from his former CID colleagues. With the reluctant help of old friends Det. Sgt. Dave Holland and Det. Insp. Yvonne Kitson, Thorne looks for other recent questionable suicides and finds several promising cases, but no clear link between the victims other than their advanced age. At home, the moody Thorne is doing no favors for his burgeoning relationship with fellow copper Helen Weeks, whom he met in The Demands. Billingham takes a chance by shaking up Thorne’s career, but it pays off in this consistently tense thriller that’s as much about Thorne as it is about solving the crimes. Agent: Anna Steadman, Lutyens & Rubinstein Literary Agency (U.K.). (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/24/2013 | Details & Permalink

The shooting murder of Boris Azarov, a high-level Russian scientist conducting secret psychological research, propels Ryan’s excellent third pre-WWII thriller featuring Alexei Korolev, a Moscow CID detective (after 2012’s The Darkening Field). Korolev, a methodical, almost plodding investigator, gets assigned to the case, but he soon realizes that several arms of the secret police either want him to back off entirely or to arrest someone just to clear the books. Korolev gets a quick demonstration of the power he’s up against: his 12-year-old son, Yuri, is kidnapped amid subtle assurances that the boy will be returned safely if Korolev goes with the flow. While the police work will keep readers engaged, the series’ chief strength comes from Ryan’s skillful evocation of everyday life under Stalin. Ordinary Soviet citizens, Korolev included, have become resigned to all forms of corruption and hypocrisy, yet must still wear the mask of communist devotion. Agent: Andrew Gordon, David Higham Associates (U.K.). (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2013 | Details & Permalink

Lutz delivers another rollicking good time in her sixth novel featuring the wacky San Francisco family of PIs (after 2012’s Trail of the Spellmans). Everyone in the Spellman clan is in an uproar because of Isabel’s hostile takeover of the firm. Izzy’s parents, Albert and Olivia, have taken up a passive-aggressive retaliation involving boxer shorts and plastic curlers, while her sister, Rae, has devised a new revenge-based income stream. Meanwhile, Izzy is helping client Edward Slayter hide his Alzheimer’s, but it’s clear someone is determined to get him kicked out as CEO of a very profitable venture capital firm, and that someone is willing to sic the FBI on Izzy for embezzlement as part of the scheme. Former boyfriend Henry Stone keeps showing up at peculiar times, and Izzy’s battles with her tyrannical three-year-old niece, Sydney (aka Princess Banana), are escalating. The hilarious office memos and footnotes add to the fun. Agent: Stephanie Rostan, Levine Greenberg Literary Agency. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2013 | Details & Permalink