Scott Hightower “Train Dance” Jonathan Wells Four Way Books, 2011, 978-1-935536-14-7, $15.95 Train Dance may be a first book… but it is an inaugural collection by a seasoned imagination. With a touch of haunt, a pinch of surrealism, and heaps of good literary taste, Jonathan Wells’ poems pull out of the terminus: “An innocent scull rows, / sixteen knees and elbows, a fraction of a centipede going slow. / I wait there...

Scott Hightower “Boy with Flowers” Ely Shipley Barrow Street Press, 2008, 978-0-9728-302-6-3, $15.95 Ely Shipley’s Boy with Flowers won the 2007 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize. I remember enjoying it; reading it through the first time, thinking how if I had been asked to suggest art for its cover, I might have suggested one of the 1905 paintings of Picasso . . . either “Boy with a Pipe” (lanky, androgynous boy in blue with a...

Why review now and not wait until I’m finished?  Two reasons: I’m no good at lying, and this will assure completion. You’re probably reading something that’s wasting your time and these books could solve that. The Instructions is a big ambitious beguiling book.  Adam Levin is genius material (and, yes, I know the dangers and futility of such a moniker, but still…).  He constructs a thousand plus pages of...

Scott Hightower “Birds for a Demolition” Manoel de Barros; translated by Idra Novey Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2010, 978-0-88748-523-7, $16.95 Birds for a Demolition is a compilation of poems by the celebrated poet Manoel de Barros. Life on the rural Pantanal (the beautiful, tropical wetlands of Brazil, in the northeastern corner of the country, near Paraguay) lies as the center of this poet’s expression. The Pantanal is a...

Scott Hightower “The Earth in the Attic” Fady Joudah Yale University Press, 2008, 978-0-300-13431-5, $16 Back in 2007, Fady Joudah’s first collection of poems, The Earth in the Attic was selected by Louis Glück as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. It is a book that will long continue to warrant reading. Joudah was born in Austin, Texas, and currently lives in Houston. He is familiar with issues of immigrants and...

The enigmatic Bill Knott is at it again.  OK, I already regret the tone of that first sentence; its suggests a ruse, which is probably the last thing (or at least somewhere down on the list?) poet and artist Bill Knott has in mind with his recent online activities.  Since the abandonment of his cult-inducing poetry blog (don’t think he’ll like that characterization either), he’s begun selling his artwork online.  For...

A good literary anthology has much in common with the musical playlists we make for our love interests. Every inclusion is a clue to the compilers’ personality and our ambitions for the relationship...

The Dirt Riddles, Michael Walsh’s first book of poems, has taken several awards. But it is interesting, and to the credit of Walsh’s talent, that the awards were not in contests reserved solely for first books.

16. Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. Page 45 of 220.  Clearly a work of genius, this one was suggested to me by my local used bookseller and framer of pictures at “A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words.”  Sorry, John.  I’ll have the book back to you shortly, when you finish framing the Coltrane poster (joking).  We talk books often, and this one surfaced in a discussion of McCarthy’s The Road....

Scott Hightower “Cool Limbo” Michael Montlack NYQ Books, 978-1-935520-40-5, $15.95 One unique aspect of a gay sensibility is that of valuing things for their intrinsic presence or style rather than their assigned “socially invested” value; ie, if the pin sparkles and swirls, it may still be fabulous — even it appears to be gold and diamond and is only made with pot metal and paste. Long after the 1950’s gay men still snapped...