The change in season brings one of the largest and strongest debut crops in years. By the time these notes appear, all the firsts below will be available.
Putting 20 years of work into one intensely wrought, luminously gripping book, Artforum critic Barry Schwabsky here stages his Opera: Poems 1981—2002. His approach to the eponymous form—colloquial, lived-in, forking the vulgar tongue, mixing in trailer park trash talk, throwing out references to Wittgenstein, Larbaud and Traherne—rises to the otherworldly. (Meritage [SPD, dist.], $14 paper 104p ISBN 0-970-91792-9)
From the Quarked-out textual imaginings of "The Beauty Projection" (where the so-called Hottentot Venus's history and legacy gain voice) and "C'est L'Amour: That's Love" (ditto the cinematic Carmen Jones), to the Tarzan-based deconstructions of Last One Out's title poem, Deborah Richards, from Philadelphia by way of London, creates immediate, can't-look-away present-tense synchronic slices of colonialism's multiply dimensioned "interventions." (Subpress [SPD, dist.], $12 Paper 96p ISBN 1-930068-21-2)
With at least three poems ("The Hole in the Ocean," "Waltz Gourd," "Errand of Slate") destined eventually for anthologies, Planned Solstice, by New York poet David Micah Greenberg, is by turns frightening, hopeful, and lyrical, taking in the nexus of exigency and bureaucracy, eros and government, sensibility and violence—in all their cyclic seasonality: "In disagreements and sympathy origins/ countenance daily the ever-stricken plan/ whose conclusions seem inevitable only from that course." (Univ. of Iowa, $16 Paper 72p ISBN 0-87745-858-8)
Another frequent Artforum contributor and an editor of Fence and Cabinet, Frances Richard makes clear in See Through that her supersonic yet dead-on descriptive skills have been on loan from her terrific poems: "I adore/ the cold seconds, before my especial heat fans out and warms the twin bed." The book is "all/ sprawled around," and can be found "Arguing, trilling./ Triumphant and violent, icecap distorting the earth's two egg-pointed ends." (Four Way [UPNE, dist.], $14.95 96p ISBN 1-884800-48-3)
A winner of the Avery Hopwood Award, The Book of Motion by UC Berkeley doctoral candidate in architecture Tung-Hui Hu offers nearly 30 lyrics (on everything from "Vigilance" to "Pseudoephedrine") and a set of 12 prose "Elegies for Self": "Most people ignored me or indulged me until I bought their vacant, bone-rimmed cups of coffee." (Univ. of Georgia, $16.95 paper 64p ISBN 0-8203-2568-6)
"How big/ is now" asks the provisional subject position constructed in Laura Elrick's brilliantly historico-rhetorical sKincerity. These nine "jerk the beat" open-field disputings of canned sociopolitical particulars push the limits of discursive and body-based action; readers become more than "fixtures/ for composition," and begin to—productively—"altercate." (Krupskaya [SPD, dist.], $11 paper 88p ISBN 1-928650-17-1)
With a lovely, effective poem about elephants, a boat-shaped poem whereby "The Bonsai Master's Daughter Breaks Her Silence" and a "Canticle with Sea Worm" ("blessed be juice and raspberry vodka"), the Miracle Fruit of Aimee Nezhukumatathil's debut comes through in light bursts of clear sensuality and joy. (Tupelo [Consortium, dist.], $14.95 paper 88p ISBN 0-9710310-8-8)
Unflinchingly rigorous and nuanced, Jean Donnelly's Anthem contains a poetry "as real as this house," comprising some of the most riveting writing on motherhood ("mothers nibble a cold/ dinner at midnight// generations stamp the water/ with shots & breeds of rats") since Alice Notley's Songs for the Unborn Second Baby. In four long pieces, two of them in prose, Donnelly asks and answers: "Where's your hand. There's your hand. Jack in a sleeve makes it a hand. You can draft a poem." (Sun & Moon, $11.95 paper 128p ISBN 1-55713-405-7)
The director of the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center in New York, David Yezzi, here offers The Hidden Model, comprised of 32 lyrics, for "Beatitudes of Poverty" ("Despite/ our frugal care, the stores are sapped; red ink/ replaces black"), "What to Do with a Mountain Lake" ("what was that unruined stillness/ of the lucid middle ring") and "Nostalgia for a New City": "Dark. Across the J, leather pants end in newsprint." (Northwestern Univ. $39.95 96p ISBN 0-8101-5144-8; $11.95 paper -5145-6)
Beginning with a listed "table of limits," the four pieces of Yedda Morrison's Crop brook "no essential Rotarian forfeit" in ingeniously plotting out the relations between labor, management, California cherry fields, California prisons, degraded monocropist environments, "dolly, my porcelain cell life" and the conditions that keep "my units reproduced and floating in the even pink vat." This book is the limit-case of discursively rendered biopower, revealing "how/ bodies/ boil/ down/ to/ purpose." (Kelsey Street, $11 paper 80p ISBN 0-932716-65-2)
Following up on the short stories of Fake House, Linh Dinh compiles three coveted, lacerating chapbooks in All Around What Empties Out. From the hilarious and horrific rhetorical questions of "Drunkard Boxing" ("My hump for your glasses?") to the withering stanzas and paragraphs of "A Small Triumph Over Lassitude" ("wildlife frolicking at ground level") and the definitely half full "A Glass of Water" ("Baby I'm not a dictionary bloated I-Ching"), the cover's translucent toilet seat is just the beginning. (Subpress [SPD, dist.], $12 paper 104p ISBN 1-930068-19-0)
Co-founder and publisher of CavanKerry press, Joan Cusack Handler is a member of the resident faculty at The Robert Frost Place and sits on the board of governors of the Poetry Society of America. Glorious, her debut, reads like an open field verse bildungsroman of adulthood, taking the alternately first- and third-person protagonist from "bitching as I do about your selfishness" to "Inviting that cypress/ to watch the sun rise/ on the Hudson." (CavanKerry [SPD, dist.], $14 paper 120p ISBN 0-9707186-4-0)
"Though a man & a lover of men/ I know little of the men I come from," and they are counted among The Missing in Rangi McNeil's debut. These 62 lyrics, most just a few lines, include a mother ("between grief & nothing/ she left him grief"), "Neighbors" ("Mr. Rufus & Mrs. Josephine are dead"), a two line poem in the voice of "Surviving Sisters," and many other portions of "The Divisible Heart." (Sheep Meadow [UPNE, dist.], $12.95 paper 88p ISBN 1-931357-09-9)
Often set in the poet's home state, the poems of Jennifer Grotz's Cusp find their speaker looking on while "Leaves in Lubbock curl/ into dark hands," "Tornadoes keep West Texas flat," and "Chest-deep in water in Corpus Christi/...Fish jerk and shiver away until only the faceless remain." Yet trips to Paris, Rome, and through literature and painting broaden into "not an end so much as an acceptance." (Mariner, $12 paper 80p ISBN 0-618-30246-8)
Patrick Rosal's Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive kicks off with old school-obsessed narratives ("To be To B-boy To lace shell-toe Adidas/ To say Word Kurtis Blow") but takes his investigations of masculinity far into the neighborhood, elegizing friends and unknowns, contemplating group dynamics ("at this moment There isn't one who doesn't laugh") and pondering "the catalog of unloved/ gestures a woman lets no one read." (Persea [Norton, dist.], $13.95 paper (80p) ISBN 0-89255-293-X)
In 48 short lyrics, Ploughshares poetry editor David Daniel offers paeans to a Seven-Star Bird, a heartlanded creature that looked on as the speaker's family "rivered these lands with abandon," but can finally witness that they "want no more than water does, low places/ To dwell and the gravity to change." (Graywolf, $14 paper 72p ISBN 1-55597-388-4)
"Lynol lay unconscious on the floor of the helicopter. His heart had died and been reborn a parachute." So begins "The Soldier's Dream," one of 13 Robert Coover—like prose dramas in At the Damascus Gate: Short Hallucinations, the first book compiled by Elana Greenfield, acting director of New School University's Arts in Context Program and incarnator of many voices: "I am the psychopathic blond vixen on the soaps,/ says my heart/ And you can't turn me off." (Green Integer, $10.95 128p ISBN 1-931243-49-2)
From "My Aeroflot" ("I no prob make myself underst&al") to "Cabbies, Cafés, Capek" ("keepbacks, kepis, kibbehs"), the stand-up improvisations of Monkey Time comprise Philip Nikolayev's version of The Russian Debutante's Handbook, where the speaker's declaiming of earnestly hilarious verses may keep him from the best parties, but whose "acacias in Moldova remember us as we were." (Verse [bigsmallpressmall.com], $12 paper 102p ISBN 0-9703672-9-5
