Poetry Picks — The Best Books of 2010

(Penmanship Books, 2010) #First Tweet(y) poetry book, go ahead and kill me. #Tristram Shandy total black page center of universe book. #Browne’s black out is In. #Poems up side the page. #Book of the Year @bobholmanpoet....

(Dead Academics Press, 2010) Is that a poetry reading is in a book reads to you ok? Cormier’s every poem is a book. “And what poetry wants more than any one thing is a volume of poems that nobody wrote.”

(Tia Chucha Press, 2010) Mainstay of New York, Jones opens up here to a more personal view, in a new book from Tia Chucha, which has to be one of the best (and most underrated) publishers out there. Flow of love and sex is natural here, and a difficult move in poetry. Here, love is also friendship, and kin, and Jones a cool-eyed guide.

(Erudite Fangs, 2010) Book of the Year: Drive-In Picture Show, Gary Parrish’s long-awaited rookie offering. Course he’s a vet, in both senses—probably the only paratrooper (82nd Airborne) to graduate Naropa as poet. And you get it in the poems—a consciousness that spills, denies nothing, yet always with a particularity that makes it not only art but new. New to us. For Parrish you know it’s consciousness, and not easy, to put the wisdom on slow motion so we can all sing along. And whoever thought of putting a George Schneeman painting on the drive-in screen on the cover gets the Nobel Cover Design Award. “There’s a black tree / growing in the backyard / that won’t sprout another color.”

(Roof Books, 2010) Cheerfully going on in his Universe where there’s no one but him, Edwin Torres doesn’t mind if we tag along, so we do... For once being human is lucky, you get this book and this poet who is sending messages from places if only Expedia could get their mitts on em! Blender mashup perfpo vizpo lango and multilinguality as lingua frank fancily, this is Torres’ masterpeace, and works equally well as a one-man Google, artist’s bible, and/or flipbook.

(Propaganda Press, 2010) Meanwhile in Bayonne, the Last Beatnik, Herschel Silverman, casually tosses off another. Cittee Poems, a tiny book that opens huge, is on fire, actually, burning the shouted word into the indispensible history of how we got here, “O cittee of pana sonic mit subishi and Con / Ed explosion panic O gobogobo gobble.”

(translated from Urdu by Musharraf Ali Farooqi, Wesleyan University Press, 2010) Sometimes I am glad I don’t speak Urdu—translating from that language with the help of the poets always leaves me thinking that I don’t know what beauty is: it exists in Urdu untranslatably. It is clear that Syed has a beauty he can spin and sing, and that translator Farooqi gets as close as skin. A mechanistic torture. Weaves political tears into poetry... carved water. “The beloved / must be first kissed / inside / a torture cell / in a salt mine.”

(Misfit Books, ECW Press, 2009) Paper Radio jumped out at me and I can’t say why, but that’s what you want poetry to do, and I never want to say why. Because it’s real and talking to me. Because it’s bloody and horrifying beauty. It’s the Clash and Buckminster Fuller, Auden and Bowie. “If there’s a way to come / back as a ghost, I will.”

(Wesleyan University Press, 2010) Best Poetry Gift Book: A Spicing of Birds, poems by Emily Dickinson with illustrations by early masters of bird art. Who are the editors, with such insight set their introduction, Jo Miles Schuman, Joanna Bailey Hodgman? Why, they are Emily’s daughters, and Emily is these birds! A perfect gift for mothers and daughters, who will then regift more daughters. And as Emily notes, men can be daughters too.