Air Guitar
by David Hickey
ISBN: 0963726455

Finally obliged to theorize his impolite tastes, judgments and ideas, Hickey lays his prejudices a little barer than altogether becomes them. Even caught in that old trap, however, he's as good as it gets, starting with his prose. Although his diction is often highfalutin (he was doing a doctoral thesis about Foucault and Derrida way back in 1967), his rhythms aren't, and he's more than fluent in colloquial English--I mean, the guy can flat-out write. —Robert Christgau

Reluctant Gravities
by Rosmarie Waldrop
ISBN: 0811214281

Once again poet and translator Rosmarie Waldrop pushes the boundaries and definitions of poetry, prose, gender, relationship, even language itself in her new volume of prose poem "dialogues," Reluctant Gravities. Intended as a sequel to The Reproduction of Profiles and Lawn of Excluded Middle, Reluctant Gravities gives the rhetorical "you" addressed in those earlier volumes a voice and response. "I decided to give the second person equal time," says Waldrop. "But I'm not interested in characters, psychology, or in poetry's traditional 'persona' or mask. The voices do not 'represent,' but frame the synaptic space between them." Some of Waldrop's concerns are formal. She "cultivates cuts, discontinuity, leaps, shifts of reference" in her attempts to compensate for the lack of a margin, where verse would turn toward the white of the page, toward what is not. Her "gap gardening tries to place the margin, the emptiness inside the text." But the point of the dialogues is purely human as the two voices with wit and philosophical playfulness debate aspects of "Aging," "Depression," "Desire," and even "The Millennium."

Protective Immediacy
by Rod Smith
ISBN: 0937804789

Bringing together poems previously published only in limited edition chapbooks, this is a much-anticipated book of poetry by Washington, D.C. poet Rod Smith. Editor of the journal AERIAL and the publisher of Edge Books, Smith is a leading name in experimental poetry circles. "This is a sophisticated poetry whose pleasures come from sounds felt right in the mouth while reading silently." — Alice Notley

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