Close Calls With Nonsense

After a few months with maybe not so many exciting new poetry books I’ve suddenly got a stack I’m (at the least) happy to spend more time looking over: from the “left,” Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path, a big sequence– maybe the best of a few big sequences– whose collage and recombinant techniques let him shift back and forth between worries about the political irrelevance of poems in the age of Big Capital, attractive materials “quoted” from science, war poetry and meta-war poetry, despite-it-all expressions of fidelity to “Ari” (his partner, I assume) and much else. And from the, um, “center,” Sandra Beasley’s second collection, I Was the Jukebox. I may have more to say about this book– which deserves to be very, very popular (I wouldn’t have said that about her first collection)– soon.

Julie Carr in the new Colorado Review has reviewed Close Calls: she gets it exactly right. (It’s flattering, too– though it also outs me as a [gasp!] liberal humanist: don’t tell my devoutly poststructuralist far-left friends. Come to think of it, can you be devoutly poststructuralist? I think it involves a contradiction in terms; then again, that’s what a liberal humanist would say.) Check out Counterpath Press, which Carr co-runs. (Co-operates? Co-exists?)

The Art of the Sonnet has been published, as of this week: there’s a big glossy hardcover copy in front of me now. Thanks to David, and to our editors…