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...

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.

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...

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...