Just as collage artists might paste a scrap of newsprint or a piece of rattan chair-bottom to their canvas, documentary poets form their poetic work from public records, firsthand accounts, and newspaper reports.
Tag: Wave Books
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Two Poets Search for Home
In their latest volumes, poets Youmna Chlala and Chris Nealon confront the notion of home and the emotional challenges of our own tentative, pre- or post-apocalyptic moment.
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When a Poet Becomes Invisible
Facing her mortality, Mary Ruefle does not ask for pity or sympathy, because death is democratic.
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Constructing the Language We Breathe
For half a century, Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop have been (despite some serious competition) the most reliable conduit for poetry traveling from French and German into English.
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Put On Sunglasses and Write a Poem
Almost every line in Chelsey Minnis’s Baby, I Don’t Care could have been lifted from a hard-boiled detective flick or a tough-talking screwball comedy.
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Urban Poems of Yearning and Heartbreak
John Godfrey’s poems are like pointillistic patterns more than traditional narratives, suggesting an attitude over a story.
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Working at the Threshold of Prose
Renee Gladman investigates the moments when writing crosses over into another mode of expression.
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Drawings that Trace the Contours of Thought
Renee Gladman’s drawings in Prose Architectures resemble not-quite-legible script, registering somewhere on the visual spectrum between image and language.
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Mary Ruefle’s Sage Advice on How to Keep Your Eyes Open While Sleeping
This is a book you want to read slowly, to savor both for what it says and how Ruefle says it.
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A Collection of Poetry Interviews Is a Work of Poetry Itself
Modern poets talk about the Poetry Project, a vital forum in which political ideologies fueled exchanges and spurred literary movements.
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In Its Own Faint Language: On Don Mee Choi’s ‘Hardly War’
Four million people (mostly civilian) were killed in the three years of the Korean War, and it is estimated that a million more Koreans were displaced in its aftermath, but here in the United States, the war is frequently referred to as “forgotten.”
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Square Deal: Anselm Berrigan’s ‘Come In Alone’
The formal inventiveness of this new volume by Anselm Berrigan is satisfying and maddening.