NewPages Book Reviews
Posted September 1, 2010
Gospel Earth
Poetry by Jeffery Beam
Skysill Press, March 2010
ISBN-10: 1907489010
ISBN-13: 978-1-907489-01-3
Paperback: 242pp; $17.00
Review by Kimberly Steele
Jeffery Beam’s celebration of the “small poem” in his latest
collection, Gospel Earth, diverts his reader from ambient
noise, trims the excess from the natural world. His poems stand
out because they whisper, infusing Gospel Earth with
stillness and secrecy. Beam creates a quiet book in form and
tone, filling the page with white space that emphasizes the
solitude and fragility of his images. His aim is to observe the
“wide silences that do not ache to be filled,” and he
invites the reader to collude with his minimalist vision. His
poems emerge like . . .
[Read
full review here]
Hold Tight
The Truck Darling Poems
Poetry by Jeni Olin
Hanging Loose Press, May 2010
ISBN-10: 1934909149
ISBN-13: 978-1934909140
Paperback: 106pp; $18.00
Review by Sarah Rehmer
From the Morton Salt Girl to straight bois, the fever dream
of Jeni Olin’s second full collection of poetry, Hold Tight:
The Truck Darling Poems draws the reader into the solitary
world of the personal: the private space where the ruminations
and raw anxieties that dominate the human mind cavort. In this
manner Olin explores identity and connection with an astute,
pain-allied beauty in four sections of short poems. The first and third sections of Hold Tight,
“So Cold You Could Fence With Your Nipples” and “The Pill Book,” . . .
[Read full review here]
The Return
Fiction by Roberto Bolaño
New Directions, July 2010
ISBN-10: 0811217159
ISBN-13: 978-0811217156
Hardcover: 208pp; $23.95
Review by Michael Flatt
If you’re reading this review, on this website, you probably
know who Roberto Bolaño is/was. You know he died at age 50,
likely due to complications from drug and alcohol addictions.
You know he was a poet who switched to fiction to support his
family. You’ve probably read at least one of his two major
works, The Savage Detectives and 2666, and
probably a couple of the shorter works like Amulet,
Antwerp or Last Evenings on Earth. The question is, does The Return
capture a significant portion of the virtuosic performance . . .
[Read full review here]
Kids of the Black Hole
Punk Rock in Postsuburban California
Nonfiction by Dewar MacLeod
University of Oklahoma Press, November 2010
ISBN-10: 0806140410
ISBN-13: 978-0-8061-4041-4
Paperback: 240pp; $19.95
Review by Caleb Tankersley
As a member of Generation X, I’ve often wondered what
happened culturally in the mid-to-late 70s. Our society went
from peaceful, late-60s hippies to the mass-market and
watered-down kitsch of the 80s. Dewar MacLeod’s new book can
explain it all. Kids of the Black Hole: Punk Rock in Postsuburban
California delivers what the title promises; multiple
chapters hash through the slow rise of and major players in
Southern California’s punk rock scene. Readers are given a
plethora of interesting bands . . .
[Read full review here]
Diasporas in the New Media Age
Identity, Politics, and Community
Ed. Andoni Alonso, Pedro J. Oiarzabal
University of Nevada Press, April 2010
ISBN-10: 0874178150
ISBN-13: 978-0-87417-815-9
Paperback: 288pp; $44.95
Review by Chey Davis
Once upon a time, I could really get into this kind of
writing. The title intrigued me. The topic was captivating. The
whole idea of merging the concepts of new media and diaspora was
fascinating. And then, I read the book. While the compilation
spans a great breadth of “diaspora,” and as such is an inclusive
and interesting mix of authors and definitions, the mix also
falls flat as the connections between the various communities
and medias the contributors talk about are hard to hold on to
. . .
[Read full review here]
Brazil
Novella by Jesse Lee Kercheval
CSU Poetry Center, April 2010
ISBN-10: 1880834863
ISBN-13: 978-1-88083-486-2
Paperback: 126pp; $9.95
Review by Ann Beman
My copy of Jesse Lee Kercheval’s Brazil smells like
Froot Loops, and I don’t mind one bit. The candy-fruit aroma
only enhances the sensory snack that this novella serves. More
than a snack, really, Kercheval’s short novel delivers dinner
and a movie in the same timeframe in which most novels are just
passing the hors d’oeuvres. Paulo Silvas is a parking attendant
at Miami’s Royale Palms, a pink-façade art deco hotel in which
he has lived ever since his Brazilian father abandoned him and
his mother there seventeen years ago
. . .
[Read full review here]
All the Whiskey in Heaven
Poetry by Charles Bernstein
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, March 2010
ISBN-10: 0-374-10344-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-374-10344-6
Hardback: 300pp; $26.00
Review by Larry O. Dean
In some fundamental ways, and at this far-flung point along
the literary timeline, it's hard to believe that this is the
first Charles Bernstein collection issued by a mainstream press.
After all, here is a poet and essayist who has been publishing
steadily for thirty-five years, yet not only that, an academic
of some renown whose reputation has only become greater over
those almost-four decades. What perhaps makes sense of this
delay in making Bernstein's poetry available to a potentially
wider audience . . .
[Read full review here]
High Notes
Poetry by Lois Roma-Deeley
Benu Press, April 2010
ISBN-10: 0981516394
ISBN-13: 978-0981516394
Paperback: 67pp; $16.95
Review by Patrick Michael Finn
Winner of the Samuel T. Coleridge Prize, Lois Roma-Deeley’s
latest poetry collection High Notes tours the bleak,
unforgiving world of jazz in the late 1950s with a cast of five
dramatis personae who move through impoverished
landscapes of bars, pawnshops, grimy hotels and police stations.
Carrying burdens of regret and despair, death and rage, the
figures who people High Notes pacify themselves with
liquor and dope in the loneliest corners of Chicago, New York,
Detroit, Kansas City, and Los Angeles, destroying themselves on
the edge of hope . . .
[Read full review here]
Bar Napkin Sonnets
Poetry by Moira Egan
The Ledge Press, December 2009
Paperback: 24pp; $9.00
Review by Jeremy Benson
It’s odd to start a collection of poems by politely turning
down a pick up line, but Moira Egan just comes right out with it
in the opening of the first of two dozen sonnets: “A glass of
wine, a napkin, and a pen / are all I need.” But something – the
cadence or the spitfire wit of the delivery, or maybe the way I
imagine the speaker looking up and coyly drawing a strand of
hair behind her ear as she flatly rejects her suitor – the way
I, like a bully’s toady, am drawn to rejection . . .
[Read full review here]
Shahid Reads His Own Palm
Poetry by Reginald Dwayne Betts
Alice James Books, June 2010
ISBN-10: 1882295811
ISBN-13: 978-1-882295-81-4
Paperback: 66pp; $15.95
Review by James Mc Laughlin
Deconstruction of identity is a recurring motif in
African-American literature. The exploration of the physical,
emotional and spiritual devastation wrought by slavery continues
to haunt its characters be it in literature, poetry or music.
The most dangerous of slavery’s effects is its negative impact
on the individual’s sense of self. Alienation underpins much of
Black American writing. Slaves were told they were subhuman and
were traded as commodities . . .
[Read full review here]
The Best Of (What’s Left Of) Heaven
Poetry by Mairéad Byrne
Publishing Genius, March 2010
ISBN-10: 0982081359
ISBN-13: 978-0982081358
Paperback: 208pp; $14.95
Review by Gina Myers
"Thursday, January 01, 2004 /
Dammit more champagne. // Friday, January 02, 2004 /
Dammit no more champagne." So goes the opening poem in The Best of (What’s Left of)
Heaven, Mairéad Byrne’s new collection which brings together
in book form poems that were originally published on her blog,
Heaven. The opening poem is part of the “calendar”
section, which contains poems concerned with days, months, and
seasons, and it sets the tone for the book, which ranges from
light-hearted and funny . . .
[Read full review here]