Scott Hightower “Emblem” Richard Hoffman Barrow Street Press, 2011, $16.95 Emblem is Richard Hoffman’s third book. His second, Gold Star Road, won the 2006 Barrow Street Poetry Prize. Emblem departs from Alciati’s 1531 Emblemata, a Latin metrical collection of moral, proverb-like sayings, in which ethical teaching is couched in elegant and forceful diction. That text is accompanied by woodcuts. After Alciati, writing such a...

Just last month I reviewed B.K. Fischer’s Mutiny Gallery, a novel in verse. Some research I was conducting sent me to another title: Different Fleshes, another novel told through poetry, written by Albert Goldbarth.

Scott Hightower “Mutiny Gallery” B.K. Fischer (Winner of the 2011 T.S. Eliot Prize) Truman State University Press, 2011, $18.00 B.K. Fischer’s Mutiny Gallery, a novel in verse, is an act of earnest imagination. In a period when much poetry is thin- I biography, it is refreshing to come to a first book that is provocatively metaphoric and hearty… and with a personae, one surmises, set apart from the author. The premise of the...

Scott Hightower “What will survive of us is love” Philip Larkin December, 1971. A light snow. The Taft Hotel. Our room across the street, overlooked the Winter Garden stage door. I was green and this was to be my first taste of Broadway. By the time the lights and trumpets lifted on the “Loveland” number, I was lost in years monogrammed across silk sashes, wigs, and in the follies of relationships...

Scott Hightower Rollerbladers cocooned in earphones occupy the site. A photographer busily shoots a lanky, posing model sporting a clear and extravagant tattoo. I shoot them from overhead; from the platform where the Führer and his industrious cronies stood and spoke, were photographed. A creative break from my own taking in of the expansive scale. Like miniature, the imagination creates vastness. Millions snapped their crisp...

Steve Fellner has published two books of poetry, Blind Date with Cavafy and The Weary World Rejoices. They could be a singular collection under the latter title. From the very opening Fellner announces his subject and his approach...

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...

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...