I came to Arctic Monkeys late–probably because so many critics were telling me I would love them. Witty, caustic, frenetic British post-punk alterna-pop–what’s not to love? I couldn’t imagine, however, what would separate them from their counterparts–from Bloc Party, or Babyshambles, or The Kaiser Chiefs, or Foals, for instance?  Simply put, what these bands all have in common, in contrast to Arctic Monkeys,...

Scott Hightower “Isaac Murphy, I Dedicate This Ride” Frank X. Walker Old Cove Press, 2010, 978-09675424-3-0, $16 Frank X. Walker is a native of Danville, Kentucky. Isaac Murphy, I Dedicate This Ride is his 5th collection of poems. In two of those earlier books (Buffalo Dance and When Winter Come), Walker traces the journey of York, the African American slave and body servant of William Clark, through a series of poetic monologues in...

Lia Purpura could write about dental tape and I’d be interested in it—for her angle of perspective, the texture of her syntax, the way the mouth becomes “any mouth” in the holy repetition of that code of human language: “the shout comes, the chant, tune and refrain: these words are the world.” And what a world, another and yet the same. Had I read a book like hers when I was nineteen, would it have seemed more possible for a...

Son Lux is the classically trained musician Ryan Lott.  Unlike his first album At War with Walls and Mazes, which took three years of tinkering to create an unclassifiable mix of hip-hop chamber pop with an indie sensibility,  We Are Rising was composed and recorded, as part of The RPM Challenge, in exactly four weeks.  What strikes me is that the new album sounds equally, if not more, meticulous in its arrangements.  Lush string...

Scott Hightower “Or Consequence” Cynthia Hogue Red Hen, 2010, 978-1-59709-476-4, $18.95 Or Consequence is the sixth collection of poems from Cynthia Hogue. Hogue is informed not only by experience and history, but also by theory and academic discourse. Hogue is a poet drawn to the cerebral and the abstract. That is NOT to say that Hogue is not masterful with images or is a didactic poet; nor does she deny the hunger for communion that...

Sam Selinger “Curious Masonry” Christopher Patton 2011, 9781554470938, $15.95 Christopher Patton’s third book, Curious Masonry, includes three translations of Anglo-Saxon poems from The Exeter Book, and “Hearth,” a work which he calls a “palimpsest,” mostly made up of erasures from his translation of “The Earthwalker,” using both the translation and the original text. The Exeter Book is an anthology of...

And to be moved by the stars was to have one’s soul stirred by some divinely wrought swizzle   A thought does not have to be thought. In fact, a thought is not—as we thought, a product of the reasoning mind. The mind is a collection. Merely and as much. Infinite, given that even the finger that traces a line in The Poetics of Trespass, follows a path that is nowhere, and is endless. A passage among passages, a project of...

I received Hannah Tinti’s gem of a novel, The Good Thief, in the mail as a free gift from the literary journal One Story, along with an invitation to what sounded like a really awesome AWP Conference event. (If you aren’t a One Story subscriber, do it. They’re great, and every three weeks you’ll get a single excellent story in chapbook form sent to you in the mail.) Having finished Tinti’s novel several days...

11. David Abram’s Becoming Animal:An Earthly Cosmology. Pg. 37 of 313. I bought this one for the cover. Not always a good start, but I’ve had luck with this before.  The interesting thing is that what I did read of this book had a profound effect on my worldview, and this, I think, was the root of its inevitable undoing.  Once I grasped the thesis, which was an affirmation of my own stirring discontent with metaphysics, I...

To kick off my year of 100 books, I started with Margaret Atwood‘s brilliant work of speculative fiction, The Handmaid’s Tale. I’d like to say that I elected to start with this book because I’m probably the last person on Earth to have read it or because my husband has been very nicely asking me to read it for at least a year. The truth is, it was the first one on top of the giant pile of unread books I pulled...