September 16th, 1955. A violent military coup ousts the repressive Peronist government and ushers in a new chapter in Argentine history. Although it ended a decade of censorship and political imprisonment, the ejection of Perón’s populist regime also struck a blow against a newly awakened national consciousness. Those hit hardest by Perón’s downfall were the working class, who for years thrived under Peronist policies of trade unionization, nationalization, and urban development. For them, the coup in the Plaza de Mayo not only signified a new age of political and economic uncertainty, but also a crisis in their nascent national identity. READ MORE

Scars A novel by Juan José Saer Translated from the Spanish by Steve Dolph Open Letter, 2011 278 pages Reviewed by Allen Zhang

In the world of poetry, the links between readership and long-term influence have always been tenuous. This is particularly true of the long poems of American modernism—such as Ezra Pound’s Cantos and William Carlos Williams’ Paterson—which may be referenced more frequently than read. Yet few poems have seen as great a disparity in influence and readership as Louis Zukofsky’s masterwork, “A.” In his own time, Zukofsky was credited with spearheading the “Objectivist” movement in poetry, which included writers such as William Carlos Williams, Charles Reznikoff and Kenneth Rexroth. Since then he’s been labeled a forebear of the language poets, and writers as diverse as Robert Creeley, Lorine Niedecker, Ron Silliman and Charles Bernstein have named him as a major influence. Yet “A,” which Zukofsky wrote from 1928 until 1973, has fallen out of print twice since its posthumous publication in 1978. Pound critic Hugh Kenner has called it “the most hermetic poem in English,” and Zukofsky himself has been described as “a poet’s poet’s poet.” In the past few years, even those readers who are undeterred by such warnings have had little chance to test their veracity. John Hopkins University Press took it off their list in 2006, and lately the book has been hard to come by. Only now, with the release of a new edition from New Directions, (which is famous for keeping its books in print) has “A” has finally found itself a permanent home. READ MORE

“A” A collection of poems by Louis Zukofsky New Directions, 2011 846 pages Reviewed by Mary Wilson

What do we think of when we pass cows grazing out along the highway, if we think anything of them at all? Perhaps we think there is something incomprehensibly dull about them—or stubbornly languid. They are fixtures of the landscape become that landscape. Their nearly inanimate bodies seem like bales of hay or rocks or trees; their consciousnesses may seem as removed. They are, as Lydia Davis reveals in The Cows, unknowable others onto which we project so much that is human. And yet, Davis asks: are we not, ourselves, unknowable others? Do we not, as the cows seem to, inhabit our own selves just as mysteriously, if perhaps somewhat less completely? READ MORE

The Cows A prose observation of three cows by Lydia Davis Sarabande Books, 2011 37 pages Reviewed by Ann Marie Thornburg

If the recent Walter Isaacson biography of the late Steve Jobs has a companion volume in the world of fiction, Helen DeWitt’s new novel Lightning Rods may be it. ,em>Lightning Rods is, ultimately, an account of business genius: specifically, of the bold, inventive product-vision that so transformed American culture in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The key events of the novel take place at the turn of the millennium, but the novel is narrated from the present by a nameless observer. As the narrator tracks a remarkable sequence of epiphanies experienced by protagonist “Joe,” we learn the history of human resources firm Lightning Rods, Inc., which markets and places “bifunctional” female staff willing to perform regular secretarial and administrative duties as well as earn substantial additional income by participating in a kind of anonymous, computer-facilitated sexual roulette in their workplaces. The system works like this: a few times a day, a female “lightning rod” will be paired anonymously with one of the male staff members by a message that appears on the computer screens of both parties. If the male employee elects to pursue the lightning rod’s services, which is entirely voluntary, both participants separately make their way to specially modified disabled stalls in the men’s and women’s bathrooms. The back half of the female participant then passes backward through a hole in the wall between the gendered bathrooms on a “transporter,” and the male staff member, equipped in the stall with condoms and lubricant, can enjoy a few moments of no-strings-attached ventro-dorsal intercourse on the company dime in the name of collective productivity. Designed to help corporations avoid disruptive sexual harassment lawsuits, Lightning Rods, Inc. is wildly successful. READ MORE

Lightning Rods A Novel by Helen DeWitt New Directions, 2011 275pages Reviewed by Kevin C. Moore

Rob Young, editor of English music mag The Wire, has given us a half maddening, half masterpiece of a book on the history of English folk. Beginning with the Victorian writer William Morris (1834 – 1896), who sought to escape the industrial wasteland by idealizing the Middle Ages, and ending with post-punk anarcho-futurist and folk paganist Julian Cope, Young’s book works as a series of chapters that don’t quite cohere into a larger thesis. And yet this isn’t necessarily a shortcoming; Young has picked a discursive subject. He educates slowly and forcefully over 600 pages and follows his subject down whatever path it might wander, overwhelming in scale though the task may be. READ MORE

Electric Eden A work of music criticism by Rob Young Faber & Faber, 2010 672 pages Reviewed by Devin King

What makes us want to get high? And once we do – what next? One part addiction memoir, one part survey of the history and state of the science of psychedelia, Peter Bebergal’s Too Much to Dream takes a roundabout voyage toward an answer to these questions, on its way covering everything from the psychedelic writings of Aldous Huxley, Carlos Castaneda and Timothy Leary, to the rec-room pseudo-magicianry of The Lord of the Rings, Silver Surfer comics, and Dungeons & Dragons. But Too Much to Dream is no more a work of geek nostalgia than one of narcotic pedantry. They’re never just what Too Much to Dream is all about, in the way that, to Bebergal, getting high is never just what taking drugs is all about. READ MORE

Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood A memoir by Peter Bebergal Soft Skull Press, 2011 232 pages Reviewed by Claire Shefchik

Born in a generation of writers that included the Nobel Prize winners Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska, Tadeusz Rozewicz (1921—) has been known as one of the darkest and most experimental voices of post-war Polish poetry. Sobbing Superpower, translated by Joanna Trzeciak, is the first extensive selection of his poetry to appear in English, and the only one that attempts to span the entity of Rozewicz’s poetic development. READ MORE

Sobbing Superpower: Selected Poems A selection of poems by Tadeusz Rozewicz Translated by Joanna Trzeciak W.W. Norton & Company, 2011 364 pages Reviewed by Marta Figlerowicz

Modern Poetry of Pakistan is a new collection of contemporary poetry translated from Urdu, Panjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, Balochi, Seraiki, and Kashmiri – the seven major languages of Pakistan. This is an important anthology because it is the first to bring as many vernacular poets in translation in a single volume. It successfully complements the representative breadth of its selections with the depth of the poetic experience that it offers. READ MORE

Modern Poetry of Pakistan Selected by Iftikar Arif Translations Edited by Waqas Khwaja Dalkey Archive Press, first published 2010 298 pages Reviewed by Anannya Dasgupta

Over the past decade, American poetry may have been luckiest in the patience and devotion of its editors. Writers whose receptions have been limited to regional or aesthetic camps, who have been called poets’ poets, or who have simply faded from view, are suddenly once more in our hands, in collected editions such as Jack Spicer’s My Vocabulary Did This to Me or Jackson Mac Low’s Thing of Beauty. In 2012 we can expect an edition of Joe Ceravolo’s poetry from Wesleyan. This year, David Trinidad has given us the poetry of Tim Dlugos in a remarkable act of service, bringing together all of the work that the poet published in his lifetime as well as much previously unpublished. The resulting volume is an unexpected pleasure and a testament to artistic perseverance. READ MORE

A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos Edited by David Trinidad A collection of poems by Tim Dlugos Nightboat Books, 2011 632 pages Reviewed by Justin Sider

W. K. Wimsatt, the New Formalist critic, opened his famous essay, “What to Say About a Poem,” with an assumption Sandra Doller’s newest book of poetry seems positioned directly against. Wimsatt wrote, “At the outset what can we be sure of? Mainly that a poem says or means something, or ought to mean something.” In Man Years, “meaning” is poetry’s predetermined enemy. With a sensibility influenced by the Language poetries of Rae Armantrout — who writes in praise of Doller’s “pinball wizard” deftness on the book’s back cover — and Charles Bernstein, Doller writes poems as syntactically liberated as they are emotionally arrested, as theoretically serious as they are slap-stick silly. Because the voices and attentions of this book are not of a single, placid mind, there is no point in pursuing a reading of it that would culminate in a single, placid meaning. Doller is a champion of the untidy, of the disorderly universe we would encounter daily if we dared to look hard enough. READ MORE

Man Years A Collection of Poems by Sandra Doller Subito Press, 2011 87 pages Reviewed by Robert Whitehead

If the protestors of the Occupy movement ever decide to nominate a poet laureate, writer and translator Daniel Borzutzky would certainly make a compelling candidate. A writer and translator of Chilean descent who lives and teaches in Chicago, Borzutzky’s latest volume The Book of Interfering Bodies—his third book after Arbitrary Tales (2005) and The Ecstasy of Capitulation (2006), which are, respectively, collections of fiction and poetry—is very timely, and it constitutes his most ambitious and unified project to date. To be clear, the brand of ironic subversion Borzutzky invents in his latest volume probably doesn’t resemble the present populist resistance as it is usually formulated. Rather, in this new book on the fate of the human imagination in the postindustrial West, Borzutzky writes what might be called bureaucratically occupied poetry. READ MORE

The Book of Interfering Bodies A Collection of Poems by Daniel Borzutzky Nightboat Books, 2011 103 pages Reviewed by Kevin C. Moore

“The language with which you will tell the story of your times”

Dorfman’s Feeding on Dreams provides a timely look at dictatorship, language and memory

The thrust of Ariel Dorfman’s newest work Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile is instinctual. In it, he sets out to do what every mortal would, given the chance: tell his or her own story, in his or her own terms. READ MORE

Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile A Memoir by Ariel Dorfman Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011 352 pages Reviewed by Erin Becker

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,” says Humbert Humbert, the pedophiliac protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. And murderers aren’t the only ones. Authors ranging from the Marquis de Sade to Edgar Allen Poe to Chuck Palahnuik have relied on similar tricks, juxtaposing the abhorrent behavior of their characters with irresistibly lovely language, daring the reader to fall under the poetic spell and into the seductive consciousness of every variety of sadist, fetishist and psychopath. READ MORE

The Necrophiliac A Novel by Gabrielle Wittkop Translated from the French by Don Bapst ECW Press , 2011 (first published 1972) 91 pages Reviewed by Ali Shapiro

Jakob Arjouni has been hailed – mainly in Germany – as the successor to American crime fiction masters Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man) and Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye) since the release of his first novel, Happy Birthday, Turk! in 1987. Arjouni picks up the tradition of “hardboiled” private eye crime fiction Hammett and Chandler made popular in the 1920s and1930s, respectively, creating a dark, seedy world and an unorthodox private detective whose morals and actions may be as suspect as the criminals he pursues for money. READ MORE

Happy Birthday, Turk! A novel by Jakob Arjouni Translated from the German by Anselm Hollo Melville House, 2011 (first published 1987) 176 pages Reviewed by SD Alison

In 1884, Paul Verlaine published his ground-breaking essay and anthology, “Les Poètes maudits.” The three original “damned” poets were Tristan Corbière, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé. Perhaps the most famous nineteenth-century French poet after Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire, Rimbaud has been translated frequently and well (most recently in an edition of Illuminations by John Ashbery) and attracted the notice not only of poets but of pop singers, too (Jim Morrison and Patti Smith have numbered among his admirers). Mallarmé, more hermetic, rarified, and often difficult to translate, remains a recognizable figure—an exemplar of both “pure poetry” and typographical experimentation. In spite of his acclaim by various American modernists, Corbière has never achieved the same appeal. T.S. Eliot listed him among those poets without whom he could not have written, and in 1920, Ezra Pound called him “the greatest poet of the period.” Nonetheless, he has remained primarily, like Jules Laforgue, a reference point for American modernism, a peculiar taste from a peculiar age rather than required reading. READ MORE

Poet by Default Poetry by Tristan Corbière Translated by Noelle Kocot Wave Books, 2011 22 pages Reviewed by Justin Sider

The Roman poet-philosopher’s basic premise in The Order of Things, one he takes pains to derive from Epicurus and to distinguish from the claims of other pre-Socratics, is that the world is made of infinite space and of loosely moving tiny atoms that alternately bunch together and fly apart. There is no purpose to their motion beyond mere accident. No purpose—most emphatically, no anthropocentric purpose—is also inherent in the increasingly complex living things these atoms sometimes cluster into. READ MORE

De Rerum Natura – The Nature of Things A philosophical poem by Lucretius Translated from the Latin by David R. Slavitt University of California Press, 2008 320 pages Reviewed by Marta Figlerowicz

“Opera,” writes Herbert Lindenberger, “is the last remaining refuge of the high style,” while movies, according to Stanley Cavell, arise “from below the world.” Somewhere in the mix of high and low, old and new, epic and profane, elite and populist, and technological and pre-technological, Marcia Citron finds the subject of When Opera Meets Film, the latest of a recent flourishing of academic books that break ground on a substantial topic and a fascinating repertory. While opera scholarship has been around for centuries, and film scholarship is as old as the medium itself, only recently have academics (generally musicologists, though the philosopher Stanley Cavell is a commanding presence) tackled the peculiar courtship of two art forms that seem, on the surface, to stand at odds. How to reconcile movies, the exemplary twentieth-century art, with opera, whose grandiloquence and earnestness in the face of absurdity recall an earlier epoch? And how to relate opera’s distant faces and resonant voices to film’s whispered close-up? READ MORE

When Opera Meets Film by Marcia J. Citron Cambridge University Press, 2011 324 pages Reviewed by Dan Wang

“I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America,” wrote Charles Olson at the beginning of Call Me Ishmael, his mythopoetic account of Melville’s Moby Dick. And Wallace Stevens, in “The American Sublime,” argued that in this country the sublime comes down to “the empty spirit / in vacant space.” In their accounts of American “space,” both poets were situating themselves within the native tradition of Romanticism associated with Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville and Hawthorne. Their interpretations of the American nineteenth-century have fed a small but vital poetic tradition, in which we might include, among others, Ed Dorn, Jack Spicer, Susan Howe, and Peter Gizzi. READ MORE

Circle’s Apprentice Poetry by Dan Beachy-Quick Tupelo Press, 2011 90 pages Review by Justin Sider

Robert Duncan’s heresies are innumerable. Often overlooked in his poetry as the pardonable consequence of a theosophical upbringing, the publication of his massive scholarly appreciation of Hilda Doolittle throws light on the depth and extent to which the poet was committed to religious dissent and poetic nonconformity. Even those who have long appreciated Duncan’s poetry might be surprised to learn what this work shows him to have actually believed about his own art. READ MORE

The H.D. Book A work of poetry criticism by Robert Duncan, edited by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman University of California Press, 2011 678 pages New Selected Poems and Translations A collection of poetry by Ezra Pound, edited by Richard Sieburth New Directions Publishing, 2010 391 pages Review by Edgar Garcia

The second quarter of The Wide Road, Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian’s strange, charming, picaresque “novel,” consists of epistolary correspondence between the book’s authors. These letters comment on the work we are reading, even as they evoke an enviably intelligent creative partnership. “We seem,” writes Hejinian to Harryman, “to be particularly given to unlikely linkages, to exciting mismatches, to the creative (playful, powerful, funny, mournful) co-existence of live incommensurabilities.” This is as good a gloss on a prominent tendency within the Language poetry movement generally (of which Hejinian and Harryman are founding members) as it is on The Wide Road itself. The Wide Road locates in the genres of travel-writing and of the picaresque happily fertile ground for such “live incommensurabilities”: “There is no analogous flattened happiness to that of curious and receptive travelers. Indeed, the morning bowed informally to us from the wide road which was filled with things to be coupled and compared.” READ MORE

The Wide Road By Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian Belladonna, 2011 92 pages Review by Len Gutkin

Reviewing Rae Armantrout’s work after her last book, Versed (2009), won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award is a decidedly different affair than it might have been, say, four or five years ago. Not that anything has changed radically in her style or content. Her poems are still terse, elliptical fragments. They still interrogate identity, voice, language, politics, sex, media, capital. At their best they still buzz like Emily Dickinson’s fly between us and the light of our casual assumptions. Reviewing Armantrout’s new work is different now because those awards and the reviews that followed make her the most recent in a line of experimental poets to find her work applauded and more widely circulated by the center, aesthetically speaking, of the poetry community, and, as such, she has also become a cipher for the shifting terrain of contemporary verse. One is obliged to comment. READ MORE

Money Shot Poetry by Rae Armantrout Wesleyan University Press, 2011 92 pages Reviewed by Justin Sider