Scott Hightower “Letters to Guns” Brendan Constantine Red Hen Press, 2009, 978-1-59709-138-1, $17.95 Letters to Guns is a first book. It is not uncommon for inaugural books to run high risks of ambition. But too often, those risks seem arch or manipulatively over-reaching. They are too often executed with high doses of self-indulgence; the taint of investment, gratuitous expectation, or a cloying aggrandizement which smudges the...

I offer David Rivard’s new collection of poems Otherwise Elsewhere from Graywolf Press as part of a 6-step recovery program (yes, we poet-types are a bit too lazy for the usual twelve) on how to hazard wisdom in an age of the poetically glib: Use their words with impunity; hack them to deep rooted stumps that catch in the throat. Find a convincing swagger before breaking into a giddy song and dance number. If squeamish about the...

Derivative. This is the easy response to Kurt Vile’s musical canon, including his latest, Smoke Ring for my Halo. Yes, he sounds like an earlier Jagger at his most jaded or a beleaguered Dylan, at times. But this is a bad thing? Talk to me about originality, to steal from Yeats, and I’ll turn on you like a badger. Why wouldn’t we want a dozen more songs that even gesture towards the greatness of “Moonlight...

Radiolab podcasts, the ones I prefer anyway, ask the questions some of us have forgotten how to ask—the ones we don’t expect to have answered—because asking them reveals the function of questions to create meaning. These podcasts are divided into twenty minute shorts and hour-long episodes. In the short “The Universe Knows My Name,” show hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich ask that universal question many ask almost daily: is...

OK, so I’m a sucker for a pun, but I’m also a sucker for this Baltimore, Maryland duo.  Wye Oak consists of Andy Stack on drums and keyboards (he pulls this off live, as well) and Jenn Wasner as vocalist and guitarist. Their new album Civilian is a departure from the sudden blasts of raw energy to be found on The Knot (with the exception of “Holy Holy”), but their new, slicker sound showcases Wasner’s...

Michael Klein’s new book, “then, we were still living” (2010), is a second collection of poems. Klein’s first appeared in 1993. (Between the two books of poetry, were two memoirs.) The two collections of poetry span the American landscape across surviving A.I.D.S. to surviving in the decade after the crashes into the World Trade Center on September 11th.

My wife and I recently watched HBO’s bold airing of Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited. Directed by Tommy Lee Jones and written for TV by McCarthy himself, the teleplay stars Jones as “White,” a suicidal Professor of Philosophy, and Samuel L. Jackson as “Black,” a self-professed ex-junky Christian.

Scott Hightower Painkiller, Patricia Spears Jones Tia Chucha, 2010, 978-1-882688-40-1, $15.95 Painkiller is Patricia Spears Jones’ third collection. The Weather That Kills (1995), her first, introduced us to Jones’ consideration of what can happen to joy and decency in a hostile environment. Jones’ Femme du Monde (2006), straddled the Atlantic to explore the destructive trail of war, the fragile rebuilding of lives and cultures,...

Dylan James Brock reviews "The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis"

Burning of the Three Fires is Jeanne Marie Beaumont’s third book. The overriding characteristic of Beaumont’s poems is their exuberant exploration of poetic possibilities; i.e., variation. Beaumont is interested in the modal possibilities of poetry, she is no dabbler. Her interest is smart, abiding - and, ultimately for the reader, rewarding.