Poetry Books, 2011
Annotation:"electrocution, no—the boy stood in the hot-hot room stammering I did stammering I did stammering I did stammering I did stammering everything you say I did I did. "
Annotation:From the publisher: The narrative poems in Dorianne Laux's fifth collection charge through the summer of love, where Vietnam casts a long shadow, and into the present day, where she compassionately paints the smoky bars, graffiti, and addiction of urban life. Laux is "continually engaging and, at her best, luminous" (San Diego Union-Tribune).
Annotation:Black Phoebe Highwayman of the air, coal-headed, darting Plunderer of gnat hordes, lasso with beak – "Surely, that fellow creature on the wing," The phoebe thinks, "should fly like this." And loops His flight path in a wiry noose, takes wing Like a cast line and hits the living fly, Ripping it from the fluid of its life.
Annotation:"These eccentric vignettes, alphabetically ordered in encyclopedic fashion -- there are, for instance, entries for Androids, Queue Jumpers (out of alphabetical sequence, of course), "Dish Bitches," Doodlers, Fall Guys, Kleptomaniacs, Late Bloomers, Old Flames, and "Steven" -- make gleeful use of poetic form even as they offer all the unabashed, plot-driven fun of flash fiction." - Seth Abramson, The Huffington Post
Annotation:Dean Young's work contends with the turbulence of love — wryly cataloging mistakes, deterioration of relationships, and broken vows. "But don't despair," he counsels readers. "There are designs that seem like chaos / only because you're too close."
Annotation:A Barnard Women Poets Prize- "These poems are fresh, crisp, and muscular. They are decisive and fearless. Every object, icon, or historical moment has a soul with a voice. In these poems these soulful ones elbow their way to the surface of the page, smartly into the contemporary now."-Joy Harjo, prize citation
Annotation:"Accretion, articulation, exploration, transformation, naming, sentiment, private and public property – these are just a few of Juliana Spahr's interests. In this, her third collection of poetry, we find her performing her characteristic magic, turning these theoretical concerns into a poetic odyssey."
Annotation:"... Finney’s poetic voice is defined by an intimacy that holds a soft yet exacting eye on the erotic, on uncanny political and family events, like her mother’s wedding waltz with South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, and then again on the heartbreaking hilarity of an American president’s final State of the Union address.Artful and intense, Finney’s poems ask us to be mindful of what we fraction, fragment, cut off, dice, dishonor, or throw away, powerfully evoking both the lawless and the sublime."
Annotation:"Smart, grounded, and lyrical, Evie Shockley’s the new black integrates powerful ideas about “blackness,” past and present, through the medium of beautifully crafted verse. the new black sees our racial past inevitably shaping our contemporary moment, but struggles to remember and reckon with the impact of generational shifts..."
Annotation:"In Whorled, Ed Bok Lee looks toward a global future, one where the dividing lines between state, religion, race, history, and culture have been blurred to the extent that the very idea of difference requires a new understanding..."
Annotation:"Maxwell's works reveal very little about their subjects; there are, rather, merely the faintest, well-chosen hints of quotidian life: a man kills a wasp; a man falls in and out of love; a man escapes from an unnamed pursuer. But from these suggestive fragments, it is possible to extrapolate an entire world."
Annotation:"The Double Truth is a collection of poems that arc from myth to history, knowledge to mystery, Eros to natural love, animals to human beings, then back in an alternating poetic current that betrays a speaker who is at once a privileged witness of her time and a diachronic amalgam of voices that are as imagined as they are real in their anonymous legacy."
Annotation:"In her fifth book of poetry, Rosanna Warren explores the political and the personal through myth, history, elegy, and erotic lyric. Starting from a childhood memory of her mother, the poems contemplate wreckage and sorrow in family life, in Hurricane Katrina, and in the Trojan War, but also moments of eerie blessing."
Annotation:“The poems of Black Blossoms tap into the waters of Lethe, as a bower uniting desire and mortality, history and the present, in tones alternately rapturous and threnodial—“What wonder to seduce with sound.” Rigoberto González alights on the darkest and most alluring flowers, “the beauty and grief of life,” and draws us down into its intoxicating sweetness.” —D.A. Powell
Annotation:"Both conceptual and haunted, these poems explore the asymmetry of the body’s chemistry and its effects on expression and form. The poems in Threshold Songs tune us to the microtonal music of speaking and being spoken."
Annotation:"...Carl Phillips, in his eleventh book, examines the double shadow that a life casts forth: “now risk, and now / faintheartedness.” In poems that both embody and inhabit this double shadow, risk and faintheartedness prove to have the power equally to rescue us from ourselves and to destroy us. Spare, haunted, and haunting, yet not without hope, Double Shadow argues for life as a wilderness through which there’s only the questing forward—with no regrets and no looking back."
Annotation:"In Master of Disguises, Charles Simic’s first poetry book since ending his tenure as Poet Laureate, he continues a trend toward writing about the “dark side,” pushing it into the limelight while exposing its consequences." - Howard Rosenberg
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Curious about the cream of this year's poetical crop? Do you care at all? This list (by no means exhaustive) assumes that you are and that you do.
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