There are too many intriguing first books this season to list them in longer format, so don't let the following 13 diminutive listings fool you:
Fashion Plates
From the "Cool Clean Chemistry" of "Maximum Sapiens" to "The Acquiring of Frisky" and "Eurowarm" ("I am woman/ I am not demented"), New York poet Kim Rosenfield finds the pivot where body image, conspicuous consumption, self-esteem and "dome parties at Vassar" form a crushing day-for-night in Good Morning—Midnight—. With withering linguistic looks and razor-sharp wit, Rosenfield deconstructs the sets of beliefs that hold media-created woman together, "Novel hormonal status, household of spells/ MGM spectacular/ You know, something to do with her own life." The book's four serial works produce their own spectacular brand of "SHA-din-froy-dah," by which "Fashionation" victims might recognize themselves and "Jump! It's Argyle Day!" (Roof [SPD, dist.], $10.95 paper 108p ISBN 1-931824-01-0; June)
Kicking off "After Watching a Local High School Stage Production of George Romero's 'Night of the Living Dead,' " moving on "In Honor of the World's First Baby Abandonment Station" and through to "Graduate Student Gets Drunk After Reading Critical Terms for Literary Study," readers may wonder where Jarret Keene can go from his titles. The answer is deep into "Long luxuriant lambswool hides/ Hairy hides." Celebrating comic-horror culture and beyond in 50-odd page-length narratives and lyrics, Monster Fashion commemorates college dumpster diving, "Super-Adaptoids," "a wealth of pornography" and plenty of beer and bad movies. A former editor of Sundog: The Southeast Review, Keene teaches composition at the University of Nevada—Las Vegas, and serves up "Spoofs that prove the criminality/ of Letterman's lack of originality." (Manic D, $13.95 paper 88p ISBN 0-916397-77-7; June)
"Forgive this letter covered in paint./ There are no rags around me./ I can't tell you where I am, but where I ain't." Selected by Cornelius Eady for the National Poetry Series, Terrance Hayes's Hip Logic is divided into five sections of fast-paced monologues and mania, leavened by "Autumn" ("its scent of cooling grease/ like the scent you inhaled once/ along the rim of a girl's collar") and portraits of greater and lesser heroes, from Homer and Audre Lorde to Shaft and Mr. T: "How to hulk through Chicago/ in a hedgerow afro, an ox-grunt kicking dust/ behind the teeth; those eighteen glammering/ gold chains around the throat of pity,/ that fat hollow medallionlike the sun on a leash—" (Penguin, $16 paper 96p ISBN 0-14-200139-2; June)
The Germ, a (near) annual magazine with an internationalist antiquarian edge and poets Andrew Maxwell and Macgregor Card at the helm, inaugurates its book publishing arm with Brandon Downing's The Shirt Weapon. If Pasternak's sister was life, Downing's in "My Clear Sister" hovers between states: "My sister—you make an incredible sound./ I gather you in the house, and all is circular./ I run from my ninth to my thirtieth year,/ From soundstage to a new climate: the bakery of death." Across "Red Texas," "Bolivia" and "68 Quick Poems" ("5// Shawn/ looks/ like/ Scott"), Downing's O'Hara-esque ear and "Really long arrows, that smile, and frown" carry his speaker through beautifully. (Germ Monographs [SPD, dist.], $10 88p ISBN 0-9709928-0-7; June)
Bird by Bird
Writer-in-residence at the Teachers and Writers collaborative in New York City, North London—born-and-raised Miranda Field won the Discovery/The Nation award, and arrives here with the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference Bakeless Prize—winning Swallow. Overflying the "Subway," "Crime Scenes," a Dürer "Field Hare," "Tumultuous Stillness," the "Museum of Natural History" and many other sites and singularities, Field gets a bird's-eye panorama of the world, "an always-climbing caller,/ always calling something far-off closer." (Houghton Mifflin, $12 paper 64p ISBN 0-618-18930-0; Aug. 15)
In describing, in turn, a "Toy House," "Toy Bed" "Toy Enterprise," "Toy Election," "Toy Maternity," and nine separate accounts of "The Voyage of the Beagle," one might think Joyelle McSweeney lacks high seriousness in The Red Bird, selected by Alan Grossman for Fence Books. While certainly playful and relentlessly up to date (check the "Celebrity Cribs" poem), McSweeney's is a satirist's sensibility, wickedly sending up, in "Avian light," the identities and settings her speaker encounters, whether in books, "a maritime chart of the Yensai Delta" or "Afterlives": "Forsythia opens its bright palm/ and the woman pushes her stroller out of it." (Fence [UPNE, dist.] $12 paper 72p ISBN 0-9713189-0-5; July)
Larger than Life
A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Johns Hopkins M.A. program, Kimberly Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate in English at UC Berkeley. In Leviathan with a Hook, she divides nearly 50 mostly page-length lyrics—on spring, fruit, love, Christian symbolism and birds, mainly—among three sections ("Angling"; "Seamless, Electric Life"; "Eastward"). Johnson's speaker plumbs a purple fruit ("The weight of the pit/ centripetal"), gives mouth-to-mouth instructions ("Do not move forward, do not move/ a finger") and tracks a "Squall Line"—"I'm knocking at the door, my turbine. My Gulfstream./ Dowsing-rod. Fastness. Wellwater. South-wind"—among other explorations and animations. (Persea, $23 80p ISBN 0-89255-282-4; June)
In 27 rough, yet tightly focused lyrics and narratives, Cathy Park Hong is Translating Mo'um—i.e., interpreting for mom, that bane of the first generation, yet also bringing her into her own work. A Korean-American from Los Angeles and Brooklyn now attending the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Hong effortlessly reduces stereotypes to phonetic rubble: "Korean characters, like stiff phonetic Legos,/ wait to join with one another while/ St. Jerome writes with his single eyelash quill/ in his painfully exact studio." Whether issuing an "Assiduous Rant" or exploring the multilingual possibilities of forms of "Androgenous Pronoun," Hong delivers "the hissing world, cold rain,/ and a tale that burned in its preamble." (Hanging Loose, $13 paper 80p ISBN 1-931236-11-9; June)
Locating "The Epithet Epic," "A New Way to Love," "Sympathy and Envy" and "The Emotion and Pleasure of Love" in Winter Sex, Katy Lederer channels classical personae, like an unnamed Odysseus, and puts them in arresting, even scary, positions: "The scar on his thigh is newly healed. Let's not see it just yet—let's see/ Both of their bodies illuminated in a uniform fashion." In the cold, even light of this collection, the speaker and the characters she conjures are, as "In Las Vegas," "Interesting. I love you/ is like sitting on a bench and you don't/ mean it when you say it./ Someone else has made you say it." (Verse, $12 paper 72p ISBN 0-9703672-8-7; June)
Difficult Terrain
"Growing up 'colored' in the American south of the 1950s, amid the hooded dangers of working class, immigrant life, I understood poetry as oxygen. And I wanted to breathe," writes Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard, born in Samoa, and now a professor of literature at the University of Hawai'i Manoa. Alchemies of Distance contains 20 poems that alternate between lyric and narrative, verse and prose. At a local fair, a shopper has a heart attack amid "bric-a-brac & over-priced t-shirt dresses/ dried grasses in garish colors, gaily/ be-ribboned clumps of pathos, fake tapa/ & hawaiian deities air-brushed on tanks & tees." Another poem tracks a "thing with feathers," finding it in southern Florida, Berkeley, Samoa, Hawai'i, and New Zealand, ending up at "Turtle Island / the wakened song of your long / dreaming and wandering into sunrise. / Haere Mai." Haere Mai is Maori for welcome. (Subpress [SPD, dist.], $12 paper 80p ISBN 1-930068-10-7; June)
Garrett Kalleberg's Psychological Corporation finds that the subject's position in psychic space can be rigidly fixed, just as "at exactly 12:10 AM a photograph will be taken of my garbage/ can from 5 miles up and in 2 or 3 years I could buy it for cheap.// That at exactly 12:30 AM a/ photograph etc. There's an advertisement in Wired." The speaker of "From a Psychological Atlas" tracks "very very very small scale" emotional movements from behind a terrifyingly blank lab coat, while he of "Agoraphobia" gazes "at the panorama and the whole/ glorious diorama of pedestrians going around, very slowly,/ for walks.// Not rats." In 18 lyrics that take neo-Eliotic alienation to the breaking point, Kalleberg finds the zero point where morality disappears in action and feeling. (Spuyten Duyvil [SPD, dist.], $7.99 paper 48p ISBN 1-881471-84-5; June)
In probing "Unstable Singularities," keeping a "Rendezvous in Greenwich" or contemplating "A High Cold Bright Full Moon," Jenny Factor's speaker in Unraveling at the Name finds "Our sexuality/ takes form only after some interpreting." In 37 formal lyrics (some in multiple, time-shifting parts), that maxim is full borne out, as marriage, motherhood, the past, various sex acts and varying complexions come under scrutiny. While a voice warns that "a marriage and the stiff form/ of all heterosexual culture will fall on you like starch," Factor's speaker cheerfully executes "orgiastic shifts in key." (Copper Canyon, $14 paper 96p ISBN 1-55659-176-4; June)
At the center of M. Mara-Ann's rectangular lighthouse is an untitled, multipage visual work, consisting of Barnett Newman—like bands of shading in which lines of text are embedded (everything from a "sovereign" to "my slow, directed concentration"), creating an effect unlike anything else in concrete poetry or visual art. Editor of the visual-poetic e-journal Wood (www.medusa.org/wood), Mara rounds out the book with "water rites," "chance sublimation," "provident ascension," "belief," "respite" and 10 other poems sum to a complete thought, or one revolution of the search light: "opening the breadth/ and a full view of character/ lingering through a slowness of step/ the light respite just located in reception." (Atelos [SPD, dist.], $12.95 paper 136p ISBN 1-891190-11-3; June)
Eating Club
In the nearly 60 short lyrics of Red to the Rind, Stan Rice's seventh collection, the poet's New Orleans summons vibrant descriptive panache: "The great/ Sugar kettles are brimful of beer and ice./ The melt-water has turned the yard into dung./ A gangplank of plastic grass/ Leads us over the muck." The book concludes with two long poems, "The Underworld" and "Dismemberments," which string together short "linked epiphanies" into a kind of Dantesque nightmare where Rice's speaker finds himself playing cards while "sitting in 'Hitler's Bed'/ Like a cherry on an eclair/ With messed-up hair," and then popping out for a Viennese coffee and "The most delicious pastry I have ever tasted and the contradiction/ Between Deliciousness and Discipline, well/ The thought nearly makes breast-milk/ Come out of my penis." (Knopf, $23 104p ISBN 0-375-41368-5; June 19)
Iowas Writers' Workshop graduate Leslie Adrienne Miller, currently a professor at the University of St. Thomas, moves to Graywolf Press for her third volume of poems. Aptly named, Eat Quite Everything You See is concerned with the various desires for sex, children, companionship and other ineffables. The force and lack of specificity of her needs drive the speaker across Europe, mostly through France, spurred by the Derridean epigraph "What is at stake is an adventure of vision," telling new stories and retracing those from her past. These densely narrated quests wind around a center of loss, their complexity an attempt to avoid the fate of Miller's begonias: "They'd grow anywhere,/ and they did... grew well in a stony place/ and were bright. When I turned them over,/ the spade found no roots." (Graywolf, $14 paper 80p ISBN 1-55597-365-5; June)
Further Locales
Liz Waldner's irrepressibly odd lyric sequences leap from Steinian abstraction to sexual comedy in the space of a pun or the dash between parts of a sentence. Readers who found her Self and Simulacra too artificial should prick up their ears for her far superior third, Dark Would (the missing person). Walder dramatizes her fascination with fragments, impenetrabilities and Renaissance science (e.g., Galileo) not just with fireworks of diction or verbal rambles, but with well-constructed couplets and sentences about the fractured psyche: "I favor impossibility// and the fragrance of might/ but couldn't be." (Univ. of Georgia, $16.95 paper 104p ISBN 0-8203-2391-8; June)
Waldner turns to diaristic reflection, harder-edged experimental prose and typographical experiment in her other summer offering, Etym(bi)ology: "We are wallets all to hold the loss. Loss and longing, I eat them for breakfast." (Omnidawn [SPD, dist.], $12.95 paper 96p ISBN 1-890650-10-2; June)
Born in 1966, Hsu Hui-Chih is one of Taiwan's more prominent emerging poets. Sheng-Tai Chang has translated his sixth collection of poems into English as Book of Reincarnation. An attention to the uniqueness of the Taiwanese landscape (and to its destruction) marks the book, while a cluster of Buddhist poems are tightly focused and full of complication. In "A Flea Listens to Buddha's Teaching," the flea narrator who lives on Buddha's body proclaims that he has "known a long time that you have no dharma to teach me / and I have no dharma to learn from you" and yet, "Now that I am still on this side, how can I burn the boat?" (Green Integer, $9.95 cloth 64p ISBN 1-931243-32-8; June)
When it was published in 1936, Edward Weismiller's The Deer Come Down made him, at 21, the youngest Yale Younger Poet ever published in the series, a distinction he retains to this day—along with being the oldest living recipient of the prize. Walking Toward the Sun, introduced by series editor W.S. Merwin, is the George Washington University emeritus professor's fourth collection (along with a spy novel, The Serpent Sleeping). "Houses" finds "What I do not know is/ what I would shelter or do shelter, what houses I am,/ strange to my understanding, that will fall." (Yale, $21.95 96p ISBN 0-300-09358-6; June)
