| Reviews of Poetry Books, Films & Recordings |
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Guide Picks: Books on poetry, poetic traditions, writing, performance & poetics Guide Picks: Books to begin your Poeducation now Guide Picks: Collections of Love Poems Guide Picks: Novels Poets Should Read Guide Picks: Poetry Anthologies (Books) Guide Picks: Poetry Anthologies (Recordings) Guide Picks: Poets’ Novels Guide Picks: Recent Poetry Books Guide Picks: Recent Poetry CDs 1968: A History in Verse, Ed Sanders Beaver Dam Rocking Chair Marathon: fragments of a lost text: The Bone Man Saga, Ron Whitehead Books & CDs from the Canadian Summit Poets, 2005 The Business of Fancy Dancing, Sherman Alexie Cantos to Blood and Honey, Adrian Castro Coming Up For Air, Margaret Randall Dance With This Man! Slim Moon Dig Infinity! The Life and Art of Lord Buckley Ears on Fire: Snapshot Essays in a World of Poets, Gary Mex Glazner First on the Listening List, Top of the Reading Stack for 2001 Give Poetry This Holiday Season! Museletter Correspondents’ Picks Happy New Millennium Approaching Luminous Animal Maggie Estep, Bernadette Mayer, Sal Salasin Merry Christmas. Chappy Chanukah. Kool Kwanzaa. Moss / Dalachinsky / Axel / Lourie Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Walter J. Ong Panoramas, Victor Hernandez Cruz Pass It On Paul Hunter, poet without punctuation Piñero & the Poet’s Life: Suffering, Creativity, Hedonism & Life Affirmation Poems from the Like Free Zone, Taylor Mali Poetry Down Under, Part II: The Book Report Poetry Picks: The Best Books of 2005 Poetry Picks: More of the Best Books of 2005 Poetry Picks: The Best Books of 2004 Poetry Spots: A Roundup of Brief Reviews Poetry Wish List 2000 Returning a Borrowed Tongue SandHommeNomadNo, Edwin Torres SLAM! A Raw Poem of a Movie Some Angels Wear Black The Sounds of Poetry, Robert Pinsky Summer 2000 CD Roundup Tapping My Own Phone: poems & stories, Ron Whitehead Ten Thousand Lives (Maninbo), Ko Un Verses That Hurt: Pleasure and Pain The Wild Party On the Stage World Without Dogs: Fuzzy Doodah Your Summertime Poetry Reading List, Part I Your Summertime Poetry Reading List, Part II
When you want to think about poetry’s place in human culture & history, or you want to write some poetry of your own & know what you are doing, you’ll find useful starting points & rich ideas in these books about poetry recommended by your guides.
Read these writers and you’ll have waltzed with some exciting partners, and staked a great view of the American poetic landscape.
Anthologies & single poet collections of love poetry, classic & contemporary, from ancient & modern cultures all over the world, selected by your guides.
In the “novelists all poets must read” category, here are those recommended by your Poetry Guides.
A good anthology can be your best map of the world of poetry, giving you a sense of the poets’ historical & artistic context and offering samplings of the work of many poets. We’ve chosen anthologies for your library in this concise guide.
Want to discover new poetry with your ears? We’ve selected the best recorded anthologies here -- samplers where you can hear the work of many poets.
Find here the secret dynamic of top flight fiction -- it’s POETS that wrote em!
Looking for a new poet’s work to read, or to give to the poet in your life? We’ve selected the best recently published collections by individual poets here.
Want to discover new poetry with your ears? We’ve selected the best recently issued CD collections by individual poets here.
1968 was Poetry Book of the Year in 1997. “Mayor Daley’s people did not take kindly to Abbie Hoffman’s smoking pot in the Mayor’s chambers....”
Dr. John Rocco reviews Whitehead’s long-in-the-making masterwork, and pronounces him “American Omphalos.... our post-Beat Theseus working his way through the labyrinth of America.”
Poetry Guide Bob Holman came back from the Canadian Spoken Word Summit in Calgary & Banff in June 2005 with a whole new required reading/listening list, which we offer with shopping links, so you can take your pick from his top picks!
Gary Glazner reviews Sherman Alexie’s new film: “the initial steps of a great new American filmmaker, a filmmaker with the skills of a poet... the little guy not scared to let you see his own true story, his self at its most vulnerable....”
Taste Joy! Here’s the language mix that puts Miami in your eye.... Read the words of Adrian Castro, “new poet singing like a cucu and bopping flesh back to life.”
Poetry/Life/Politics: Gary Glazner reviews Margaret Randall’s book, Coming Up For Air, the first publication in Pennywhistle Press’ Compendium Series, combining poetry with the poet’s life story in prose and photos.
Slim Moon’s Kill Rock Stars label is the great hope both of indie records and poetry’s purity and more than that, it rocks. So does his CD.
Bob Holman reviews Oliver Trager’s book on Lord Buckley: “the Hip Messiah, the Hiparama of the Classics, the comedian sans punch lines, the entertainer who went for astonishment, not laughs....”
Sandy de Nimes, “the paramour of the plume,” reviews Gary Mex Glazner’s 2002 book of poems, travel stories & essays, “a road worth traveling and a book worth reading.”
Bob Holman followed his year-end 2000 Poetry Wish List with a list of essential poetry books & recordings for the beginning of the new millennium in 2001.
We compiled a poetry gift list for your last-minute holiday shopping, based on the recommendations of our Museletter correspondents. Plus Bob Holman’s Poetry Wish List of the best poetry CD’s & books of the year 2000.
As the Beast made its final Slouch to Bethlehem at the end of 1999, we noted a few things to pause gratefully for: new work by Sapphire & Jack Collom, Jose Garcia Villa at long last in print in the U.S.
The indie CD from Anne McNaughton, Peter Rabbit & Mexican Bob: a Last Living Beat Jazz Poetry CD that is retro-future, porno, improv-laden, mean, charged, political.
“Hot sex and brainy,” “Holy perfect storm” & the oxymoron of “misanthropic purity”: Bob Holman reviewed three new books to spin us past the Fall 1999 equinox.
In 1998 we said, why not give the gift of poetry? CDs by William Burroughs, David Thomas, Patti Smith, Linton Kwesi Johnson & Andrei Codrescu, books by Kenneth Koch & Robert Pinsky.
Poetry books (by Thylias Moss & Brett Axel) & recordings (by Steve Dalachinsky & Dick Lourie) you needed to fill your eyes & ears with word-life in Fall 1999.
Bob Holman reviews Ong’s analysis of the oral tradition and how writing changed human society and consciousness: “the perfect gift for the grapholect in your life.”
“Home Is Where the Music Is” in Cruz’s new book, the latest fresh roasted off Coffee House Press, perhaps the best “small” press in the country, stepping to the heartbeat of la poesia nueva.
Utah Phillips, Sekou Sundiata, Ani DiFranco, M. Doughty... staking out a glorious new territory for Spoken Word CD’s.
Paul Nelson, founder of Global Voices Radio & the Pacific Northwest Spoken Word Laboratory (SPLAB!), interviews Paul Hunter on his collection, Breaking Ground (Silverfish Review Press, 2004), a book which explores the vanishing American experience of farming on a small scale.
Michael Salinger talked with Dahveed Ben Israel of the Last Poets after a screening of 2002’s poetic biopic, Piñero -- fertile ground for a conversation about the poet’s lifestyle, the relation between suffering and creativity, poetic communities and the arts’ affirmation of life.
Bob Holman reviews Taylor Mali’s CD: “What Makes Taylor Mali? Clarity Born in Contradictions (w/Attitude)... Listen... and you learn How to Read with your Ears.”
The Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz Awards for Excellence in Australian Poetry.
2005 was truly a great year in poetry, and your Guide Bob Holman had a long list of sure fires, must reads, books that sing, dance & change you, offered here in no particular order.
Our long list of sure fires from this great year in poetry wouldn’t all fit in one top ten list. So here are more of the best books of 2005.
Casting our eyes back across 2004 in the poetry world, Poetry Guides Bob Holman & Margy Snyder chose the best poetry books we’ve read during the year, the ones you’ll want to own & reread.
Books by Luis Rodriguez, Koon Woon, Thylias Moss & June Jordan, CDs from David Vanadia & Tim Koberstein.
Bob Holman offered his own Poetry Wish List for the 2000 holidays, the best CDs and books of the year.
The Filipinos are coming and it’s feedback time: the rewriting of US pop culture... a scathing deconstruction of the American Dream.
Making the Old Tree Gasp With Life: The posterboy of the Nu Poetry Move of the early 90s, presents us with the self-designed chapbook as fully realized artifact.
...won best feature at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. This is the recipe for a movie for a new millennium.
Poetry Guide Margery Snyder reviews Some Angels Wear Black, Eli Coppola’s posthumous selected poems, edited by David West & with an introduction by Michelle Tea (San Francisco: Manic D Press, 2005).
A review of Robert Pinsky’s primer: “What’s important is... the book’s dedication to poetry as a spoken art.”
Mikhail Horowitz, John Trudell, Ed Dorn, the Rhino anthology of black writers, Firesign Theater, Jaap Blonk, Common, Mike Ladd: Bob Holman reviews the current poetry, spoken word & hiphop CDs that should be in your ears.
His CD is “Appalachia in all its lost-in-the-holler glory and the Beat zone of poesie in full utopian regalia....”
Poetry Guide Margery Snyder introduces Ten Thousand Lives, a selection of poem-portraits from the first 10 volumes of Ko Un’s vast poetic project: to remember & depict the faces & lives of all the people he has ever known or known of. Translated from Korean to English by Brother Anthony of Taizé, Young-moo Kim & Gary Gach, and with an introduction by Robert Hass, it’s “a lovely small-format book that has a beautiful compact weight in the reader’s hand, suited to be thumbed through again & again, its characters echoing & reflecting in the reader’s mind.”
from the Poemfone Poets was the breakthrough anthology of a new poetic Owwww in 1997. The first major work to lay out the perf-po/spoken word aesthetic nakedly on the page and say, read for yourself.
Museletter correspondent Cristin Aptowicz reviewed the twin New York musical stage productions of The Wild Party in spring 2000: “If Joseph Moncure March wasn’t already dead....”
If you wanted to get in on the ground floor of what would come next for poetry in 1999, this CD was the place to start.
Linton Kwesi Johnson, Pere Ubu, Firesign Theatre, d.a. levy... Caramba rhumba! Vacation vibration! Poetry sensation!
Amy Ouzoonian, Philip Whalen, Onyx Spoken Word, Anselm Hollo, Anne Waldman, Jack Collom, David Henderson, Kimiko Hahn.
