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...

Let me explain.  Raccoons, we presume,  are mischievous creatures: they get into our trash with dextrous little hands; they wear masks; they could be friendly or rabid; we make hats out of them.  Squirrels, on the other hand–though they too are no doubt responsible for domestic mischief, especially for you bird lovers–are, shall we say, less symbolically charged beyond their general mysteriousness as living creatures. So when...

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...

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...

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...