Poetry Picks — The Best Books of 2009

(Nightboat Books, 2010) In the Function of External Circumstances is dated 2010 but don’t wait—wanna know whither poetry? If “Dither” is the Answer, then Torres is Your Dancer. In between the time compass of the butterfly dinosaur construct, Senor Torres leads us by the hand or any available appendage—nose? brain?—to the sunspot of pure poesy. His own bad performance self gets these words set down in a graphical laffical maniacal tricycle phase of a page—and they too will trick your tongue tangoistically. Nobody else splays it like he adores. A giant step forward—into the abyss of love! Is the word of One of a Kind, Spanglito Theater Perf Head—Yummy.

What Belladonna is doing is breathtaking. Here is #1 in The Elders Series: Leslie Scalapino from Helen: A Fugue (“Or such / when to speak // legs to walk /and others flew ) and E. Tracy Grinnell from Hell and Lower Evil (“I’m sick of innocence”) followed by a conversation—stunning. And here is #7: Cara Benson (“perhaps the festivities are what they seem”), and Anne Waldman’s two big poems, “G Spot,” from Iovis with drawings, and “Gender Fib,” “Endangered rib / Framed rib / Rib that settled your fate that cast you in stone”... And (this is still #7) an intro poem by Jayne Cortez, “I am New York City,” “here is my brain of hot sauce / my tobacco teeth, my / mattress of bedbug tongue.” Buy ’em by the sack: Belladonna!

(Belladonna, 2009) Emma Bee Bernstein gets to be an elder because Susan Bee and Marjorie Perloff put this together and Johanna Drucker wrote the intro—three esteemed. But what it is is GIRLdrive, Emma’s big project, road trip blogs with her pal Nona Willis Aronowitz, feminist essays and crazy cut-up collages, all of which she packed in before her suicide in Venice in 2008 at 23. So the book is shot full with sadness, but Emma’s unstoppable spirit is the nerve that drives the book, that and her brilliant writing, her mind. To engage with this book is to engage the unknowable, yet to know a little tenderness of this artist in the making. The covers, by her mother, Susan Bee, are fierce, colorful art and help make this book a thing to cherish.

(Wesleyan University Press, 2009) Rae Armantrout is always forming form, formally, informally, and the projective Versed is a sweet symphony of riches. Reading the two “books,” Versed and Dark Matter, with 42 and 43 poems respectively, one stops and stares at the sun for a while and then dives back in—the edges of the poems, the books/sections seem permeable, yet critical. People talk. Plants grow. Boots are laced up. Dailiness with an intelligence behind it, translated into words—that might be what a poem is. Armantrout / leaves no doubt. “Thus / drivers inching southward / will see the phalanx / of birds heading west / as one spontaneous gesture.”

(Hanging Loose Press, 2009) Move over, Poetry. Erica Miriam Fabri has entered the room: a first book, Dialect of a Skirt, is persona deluxe, post-feminist, playful and serious and adorable and untouchable simultaneously. She invites a grown-up audience to lean back and enjoy the show—“The First Plastic Surgery Patient on Earth,” “The Eye is an Organ of Light.” And for those who don’t get, they can get it, when get is Get Lost: “That’s a real man, one whispers, / as another asks the meaning of my son’s name, and I tell her, Water.”

(Coffee House Press, 2009) My mama was a coalminer’s daughter so I have some real connect to Mark Nowak’s gorgeous cross-genre Coal Mountain Elementary. The words come from mining disaster survivors’ testimony, rescue teams, a curriculum, newspapers—investigating mine disasters in China and US. Photos are by Nowak and Ian The in China. The overall effect is totally devastating. This book is heir to Reznikoff’s Testimony, but a species unto itself. This is politics, straight—humanity is what politics is and Nowak stares it down. A totally beautiful book to savor.

(Wesleyan University Press, 2009) “I am both Cher and Emily Dickinson: I’m a biker chick reading in a midnight library,” says Adrian Blevins, and hey, who am I to disagree? Live from the Homesick Jamboree, like her first book The Brass Girl Brouhaha (Ausable Press, 2003), gets the most bodacious possible words streaming from the mouths of hillbillies, rum runners, snakehandlers—in other words, her whole family. A tumbling tumult of language that’s free-flowing and never-ending, a shower in a drought, “stretched out black eyelashes and somehow-hectic Capri pants.” A run-on show-off (Cher), a darkened depth (Emily).

(art by William T. Ayton, Narcissus Press, 2009) Eliot Katz is an American Purist, a political writer sans compromise, a keen observer of the human condition and what got us here. Love, War, Fire, Wind combines his words with art works by William T. Ayton. It has some big, blistering poems—“Rocking the Globe from D.C.”: “They have boarded off the demonstration’s / central planning space”—and short character sketches—“‘My shoes are too tight,’ / she answered. / ‘I think if I keep walking / one day they’ll stretch.’” There’s plenty of his mentor, Allen Ginsberg, here, both in memoir and in passion. Ginsberg’s is a big soul to miss—Katz does all he can to keep the activist in the poem, and awareness in the populace.