First Book Blowout

All of the following 18 debut titles will be published in time for National Poetry Month this April.

While the title poem is familiar from its recent publication on the back page of the New Yorker, the biggest chance of a breakout for Spencer Reece's The Clerk's Tale rests with Reece's street cred: he is an assistant manager at Brooks Brothers in Palm Beach. Those looking for the male equivalent of Deborah Garrison's A Working Girl Can't Win may be momentarily disappointed in the fact that few of the other poems work as critiques of working life and store culture, but should be buoyed by lines like "You are being born. Feels good./ Something enormous kisses you." (Mariner, $12 paper 80p ISBN 0-618-42254-4)

"While/ we title our/ meaninglessness/war," Kaia Sand has been writing Interval. The sequence "Acquifer" brilliantly cascades through "a perfect/ sierra snowmelt," salty crops, China's disinformation, "western confusion," "overgrazing our conversations," the West Bank, "horses hauling coca cola/ up Honduran mountains" and "tragedy-solution-closure," while the long poem "progeny" finds "no nomenclature only lipstick/ where eyes would be" in the gendered raising of our young. (Edge [SPD, dist.], $10 paper 80p ISBN 1-890311-14-6)

"Do you flip back and forth/ through The Miami Herald comparing every word/ to El Nuevo Herald?" asks Carolina Hospital of "The Hyphenated Man." He is part of the everyday life of The Child of Exile: A Poetry Memoir, detailing Hospital's hyphenated dailiness, where "Mongo/ Dámasio/ Chocolate/ I hear them all." (Arte Publico, $11.95 paper 96p ISBN 1-55885-411-8)

"The case for nonsense is not the same as the case against meaning," writes poet laureate Louise Glück in her introduction to Peter Streckfus's The Cuckoo, which she has named the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. With repeated, wry invocations of Zen, Streckfus tracks the oddly nesting title bird through a series of set-piece—like short narrative lyrics and allegories, "not sure if from fear or wonder." (Yale Univ., $25 80p ISBN 0-300-10271-2; $13 paper -10272-0)

To imagine a very, very angry Gertrude Stein hopped up on amphetamine (and Prozac) writing with the laser-like, short-lined, terceted clarity of Robert Creeley and a child's fury at truly horrific parenting that haunts one into adulthood is to approximate 248 mgs., a panic picnic, the debut of Susan Landers. For anyone willing to accept a grotesque, allegorical set of stand-ins, including "mother little," "Aunt gargantua" and "King," this little pill will be an instant classic of abuse literature, of surviving to "Break. Avert." (O Books [SPD, dist.], $12 paper 88p ISBN 1-882022-50-5)

"I am the only one in the car/ without a baby. I can say this/ in seven dialects." Such are the full-formed thoughts emerging from Half-Lit Houses by Tina Chang. In 40-plus lyrics, Chang channels historical settings (mostly varying provinces in '30s and '40s China) and limns an identity marked by "life broken down by the sallow tongue and feverish saliva,/ the salt and sauce defeating you." (Four Way [UPNE, dist.], $14.95 paper 88p ISBN 1-884800-52-1)

Fans of Virginia Hamilton Adair and Ruth Stone will find the poems of Jane Mayhall, making her book debut at 85, "tough in the unwatered heat./ An old-age brownish glare not wiped/ out, the inner resplendent." While some may balk at a "Ballad of Playing Tennis with Theodore Roethke at Yaddo" or considering "[Lincoln] Kirstein's Table," two of the more name-droppy poems in Sleeping Late on Judgment Day, Mayhall has insights for all tastes and moods, "cordial, volatile." (Knopf, $22 112p ISBN 1-4000-4174-0)

If mid-century mannerist verse seemed to take a hiatus after the '60s, its retooled comeback continues in Facts for Visitors by Srikanth Reddy. The destination is a familiar place that features at least eight Dantean "Circles," the first of which contains the apostrophe "We have done no wrong,/ my friends, & yet we find ourselves soiled,/ sold, carbonized teeth in a moss-riven jar." How to break out? "When it gets lonely, I sit by the river & read. Correction. There is no river. Mostly, I read." (Univ. of Calif., $45 80p ISBN 0-520-24042-1; $16.95 paper -24044-8)

Beginning with one of John Ashbery's 10 favorite poems of all time ("Birthday"), At Port Royal is the long-awaited first collection of Christopher Edgar's lyrics. From a set of "Possible Gothams" to "War in a Mousetrap," Edgar proposes numerous numinous possibilities for being, based on a form of exchange the book invents as it goes: "If we trade in this grisalle world, can we get something celadon, or perhaps the mint green of China?" (Adventures in Poetry [SPD, dist.], $12.50 88p ISBN 0-9706250-8-1)

Seven-year veteran flight attendant Rosemary Griggs gives her alter ego, Sky Girl, the suggestive name of Kimberlie: "The handsome young first officer comes out of the cockpit to help/ Kimberlie say goodbye to the passengers,// Okay, now, if it is someone you would sleep with say, 'Have a good day.' I'll do the same." The book follows Kimberlie's turbulent adventures in Saginaw, Phucket, Tokyo's Narita airport, the "Hong Kong Ladies' Night Market" and on the "DEN-EWR" and "SFO-EWR" runs. (Fence Books [UPNE, dist.], $12 paper 72p ISBN 0-9713189-8-0)

With a tremendous sense of line, Brenda Iijima frames the area Around Sea, "Just the landscape/ before realization/ before resource/ before it could/ speak." In six sections titled by the pages that begin them ("II: page twenty-one), Iijima counts "NASA's/ low numbers. Buddha's/ big toes. Mohammad's/ breath," downloads "[t]he oculus eye charged with impressions of outer motions," and finds a way to "Curtail the will/ to die." (O Books, $12 paper 104p ISBN 1-882022-51-3)

Set mostly in the China of the recent past, Shao Wei's Pulling a Dragon's Teeth tells the story of a girl's childhood and coming of age, from playing with a folded handkerchief mouse and "my first apple by the Yangtze River" to decrying a "Sunflower Bitch" ("you see how deep how dark how marvelous and amazing/ if you call your name again and again") and allowing that "[i]t is my turn to be quiet/ when you enter me slowly." (Univ. of Pittsburgh, $12.95 paper 88p ISBN 0-8229-5835-X)

Allison Cobb's Born 2 features two sections of Lisa Jarnot—inspired graphic work ("One-Foot Book" and "J Poems") where founded text and ripped icons form an uneasy landscape and where what's crossed out is as important as what remains. Among much else, the remaining four sections touch on Cobb's difficult identity as a poet from Los Alamos ("a homeland/ he wants a box there/ he wants them to burn"), the myriad ways in which New Mexico has been (mis-)appropriated ("Dirt knows.") and the colloquy of "Polar Bear and Desert Fox," where "Livey life tress thigh arrows vroom blue." (Chax Press [SPD, dist.], $16 paper 102p ISBN 0-925904-39-2)

"The notes begin with the words motherhood, fortune, providence, the stars and then depression, waves of corruption & rot." So begins The Escape by Jo Ann Wasserman, chronicling the life of a woman poet on the '90s East Coast, with blanked-out drinking, sex and "a house in Queens with linoleum and a plastic train" finally dissolving into the title poem's primal scene—visiting, and leaving, mother: "I make x's on the days left until I leave, and then the day arrives and I go. The trail of x's follow me." (Futurepoem [SPD, dist.], $14 paper 136p ISBN 0-9716800-2-7)

A contributing editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review and the founder and editor of Slope (www.slope.org), Ethan Paquin has his U.S. debut in Accumulus, which collects, like clouds coming together, two full-length projects, The Makeshift ("pretty much a protest, elegant and hurt dazzling") and Dead July, which matter-of-factly reports "I wrote the forbidden book.// I threw my smile in the fire." (Salt [www.saltpublishing.com], $15.95 156p ISBN 1-844710-15-7)

Winner of the 2003 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, Invisible Bride, by Chapel Hill, N.C.—based poet Tony Tost, starts with the fact that "The man's Vision begins with the child's Sob" ("There is no temptation to call this another form of surrender") and passes through myriad prose blocks loaded with information, prayer, diaristic narrative, obsessive footstep-counting, a "swan costume" and other lenses for glimpsing an ethereal other. (Louisiana State Univ., $24.95 64p ISBN 0-8071-2964-X; $16.95 paper -2965-8)

"Angels getting pulled out of clouds repeatedly. The same angels, more than once." A peculiar and compelling specificity marks The Dirty Halo of Everything, a set of seraphs by Geoffrey Dyer. Comprising six prose pieces and one serial poem ("you examined my small and fragile creation"), Dyer finds the aureole above the everyday, creating small spaces in which people might see "symbols for stars and other contagious light"—as well as each other. (Krupskaya [SPD, dist.], $11 paper 80p ISBN 1-928650-16-3)

From a "Letter to a Silvery Mime in Yellow" ("in the public library I'd find in greater/ metropolitan phonebooks other Brians' addresses/ and write away to them for help") to "String Theory Readymade," "A Whole Host" and "Littleness of Being" ("I, when thinking little, pinch into the kiss/ his ears can be made to peck") Brian Blanchfield's speaker addresses himself to a variety of people, situations and embraces in Not Even Then. (Univ. of Calif., $45 88p ISBN 0-520-24038-3; $16.95 paper -24039-1)