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...

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...

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...

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.

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,...

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.

Scott Hightower Chinese, Japanese, What Are These?, Nick Carbó Pecan Grove Press, 2009, 978-1-931247-64-1, $15 In a scene in the 1982 Ridley Scott movie, Blade Runner, Rachel, the lovely android replicant, corrects her human suitor Rick Deckard, “I am not in the business; I am the business.” Nick Carbó is a tricky author. His work is not about hybrid; it is hybrid. That is not meant in anyway as a condescending diminution of...

Robert Wrigley’s newest book is entitled, Beautiful Country. (It is Wrigley’s eighth book of poems.) The title is drawn from a quote from John Brown, the American insurrectionist. In Brown’s reference to “country,” perhaps he was talking about the countryside of Charlestown, Virginia; perhaps he was talking on a larger scale about the sprawling national identity of the United States, itself. Wrigley, too, likes to work on a terrain that can shift from remote instinct ...