Category: books
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Fuck You — Aloha — I Love You
Here is a book I read that was intellectually interesting, emotionally compelling, and formally distinct from other work I’d been reading. Here is a book that I would consider poetry of rhetoric more than poetry of imagery, although the image of the Hawaiian punk rock singer screaming the title of the book stays with me. […]
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Darker
I love how crazy this book is, how schizophrenic and obsessive and paranoid. I admire small poems, their bravery and simplicity. I praise the declarative sentence. I sometimes (as I do here) support end-stopped lines. I acknowledge anaphora (“Giving Back”) and its effect. I love list poems, poems that steal a form from outside poetry, […]
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Ariel
Before MM’s iconic book, there was this one, the book she left behind, stacked neatly on her desk in manuscript form. In school I once heard a lecture in which my teacher positioned Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath as opposing elemental forces. While most of the vernacular escapes me now (aside from one of them […]
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The Country Between Us
Is anyone in my generation not indebted to “The Colonel”? If not indebted, can any of us write without acknowledging it or understanding its importance? At its core, this is a book about exile: physical exile abroad–the kind of displacement of vision that burnishes a poet’s perspective both on the world and on one’s own […]
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100 Selected Poems
Why is he not more widely discussed now? It’s a curiosity to me. I remember my classmate in grad school who, breath a fog of whiskey, insisted he was the greatest poet of the last century. I remembered this book, that it had encouraged me to write when I was younger, I remembered reading “Buffalo […]
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Tea
A book you read sideways. A book with lines full of caesura like pot holes. With disco lyrics, classical allusion, secret gay slang. A book that is two books. A book full of boys dead or dying. A book of spirituals, of a kind. A book without titles. A book with the detail of gossip, […]
Charles Jensen | Writer 