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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
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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."
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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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