Close Calls With Nonsense

I’m up at the National Book Critics Circle blog talking about enumerating recent reading: I seem to have developed a love/ hate/ scratch-head relationship with the latest book by Rachel Zucker. I disliked her first two, never saw her third, and am now enthused and discombobulated by the fourth. If you get it, start with the one where one of her kids has a fever.

In the latest Jacket, Rob Stanton (a critic I want to read more often) looks at Joseph Massey’s big collection of small things.

I so want this book, and not just because a few of our friends are in it.

Courtney Queeney in Bookslut has a thoughtful essay about feminism, femininity, and contemporary poems. She thinks I’m falling prey to unconscious sexism when I praise Ange Mlinko, in an early poem of hers, for virtues that “Personal Poem,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” and Paterson also possess, which is weird, but I take her larger points: scroll down for spot-on comments about Glück’s justly famous poem “Mock Orange.”

Here’s a prolific and thoughtful poetry blog, full of interviews with editors, I’m glad to have (just) seen.

Jen Hadfield, a Scottish poet whose work (fragmented couplets, prose poems, sense of place) I like a lot, really ought to be known to more than three Americans: you can read a neat new interview with her at the Scottish Poetry Library blog.

And in non-poetry news that still counts as arts news, I saw the Trash Can Sinatras last night, with high expectations, and was surprised to discover that though the TCS surely practice a lot, and the lead singer has quite a flexible voice, the new Youth Group record (which the club had on the stereo) was not only simpler and more “commercial” (whatever that means these days) but better, with more internal variety, too.