Category: books
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New Review of Barbie Chang
Poets & Artists recently published my review of Victoria Chang’s new poetry collection Barbie Chang, which I enjoyed and admired a great deal. We first meet Barbie Chang, the character whose life and thoughts populate most of Victoria Chang’s fourth collection, at a conference, when everyone stands to give the speaker a standing ovation except Barbie,…
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Against Genre
The concept of genre—a defined category of writing, like poetry or novels or plays—isn’t currently fashionable. Many people find such categories too restrictive or fussy. Much of the energy of contemporary literature is in crossing and mixing various genres in single pieces of writing. Yet when it comes to poetry, it can help to think…
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The New Year
First, this post owes a big debt of gratitude to Kelli Russell Agodon. A few months ago, Kelli tweeted about “the old days” when poets blogged widely and regularly. I, too, missed that spirit of community, and in the tweets that followed from others, a movement took back its shape, and many, many poets committed…
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Ed Madden on his new book Prodigal: Variations
When I was growing up in rural Arkansas, I remember being taught the story of Abraham and Isaac in Sunday school. The whole story is a real soap opera—the patriarch gets the servant pregnant, then his postmenopausal wife, who demands the servant and her kid be kicked out. There’s sex, jealousy, rejection and exile (and…
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Andrew Demcak on his new book Night Chant
My newest poetry collection, Night Chant (Lethe Press 2011), began with the leftover poems that didn’t fit in with the tone of my first collection, Catching Tigers in Red Weather (Three Candles Press, 2007). Around 2009, I became interested in the idea of “hidden,” which logically leads to the idea of “discovery.” I was still…
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Blame this mess
Due to all my madness, transition, and inability to maintain a clean and orderly house this year, I left off two very important titles from my No Tell Motel List of Best Books of 2010: Suzanne Frischkorn’s Girl on a BridgeThis book turns away from the idyllic landscape of Frischkorn’s previous book and explores the…
Charles Jensen | Writer 