Is The Self Unstable on Your Holiday List?

Newly available from Black Ocean, Elisa Gabbert's The Self Unstable is finding its way onto many holiday lists this season, including The New Yorker's and HTMLGiant's. The New Yorker describes The Self Unstable as a "wonderful surprise," and HTMLGiant praises its ability to "[unsettle] the role of truth and [interrogate] the “I” in both literary and daily life."

Want The Self Unstsable in your home for the holidays? Click here to purchase (free shipping as always!).

 

Read The Best Books of 2013 in the New Yorker here.

Read a 2013 Holiday Shopping Guide by HTMLGiant here.

What else are you hoping to read this winter?

Swamp Isthmus on The Rumpus

What is it like to read Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s poetry?

It is like being caught in a flash mob of fine language and finding yourself swaying along. It is like twisting a kaleidoscope and watching the images swirl together, then split apart with deliberate and deceptive grace. It is the way I imagine it would be if I found myself suddenly lodged inside a snow globe, just as some gentle hand begins to tilt it upside down, and then all at once it is snowing, and the whole familiar world is made strange again—unsettled, unhinged, and perceptibly more beguiling.

Swamp Isthmus by Joshua Marie Wilkinson reviewed on The Rumpus by Julie Marie Wade

Get your copy here.

Check In with Joe Hall

Joe Hall, whose The Devotional Poems was released early 2013, is currently on tour, gracing readers across the US with works worthy of reverence. You can follow along on his blog HERE for dates and bits of awesome.

The Devotional Poems is quickly finding believers. Recently reviewed in The Huffington Post, Seth Abramson writes, “It is a rare poetry, and a rare poet, who so accurately and with such conviction enacts the unwinding of a body and a spirit. One is tempted, therefore, to see in The Devotional Poems a sort of generosity, even martyrdom, typically absent in Confessional and post-Confessional verse.”

HTML Giant featured a transcription of a book club discussion of The Devotional Poems, in which the question of who will become the next scholar of Joe Hall is considered, along with notation, and effect. Maybe you want to hold your own book club discussion of Hall's work? Find it here.

Blood Lotus Double Review

BloodLotus Journal writes a double review of Feng Sun Chen's "Butcher's Tree" and Janaka Stucky's "The World Will Deny It For You," tracing the lines between poet and poet-publisher: "Paradox, nature, mysticism and spirituality, and loss of human connection are all themes in both Stucky’s chap and Chen’s full-length."

Read it here!

Micro Review Monday (on Wednesday)!

Correct Animal
by Rebecca Farivar
Octopus Books, 2011
$12.00

Yes, this is an animal, cooing under terse lines mirroring old fashioned poetic disturbances. Disturbances in the sense that young poets can be terrorized by mere existence too. Farivar writes

If she wants
to say bird
not finch
not starling
not snipe

let her

This is how to break a heart, to rip into poem flesh and say “give me some space to breathe,” to show a subtleness in what plagues the poet that can at once be gendered and completely not. All I want to do is synchronize my movements with this animal. All I want to do is be correct too.

—A. Minetta Gould

Julie Doxsee on Bookslut

If you're feeling wayward, check out Sean Patrick Hill's review of Objects for a Fog Death on Bookslut. What follows is just a tiny peep, so be sure to click the link to read the whole thing. 

Objects for a Fog Death is a conceptual book, a series that evolves toward a unified poem, a singular tone elaborated upon and improvised to the underlying rhythm. Meaning no poem in particular stands out as singular; rather, Doxsee’s poems revel in their fragmentary nature: they are a part of something larger, but in and of themselves seem to hover at the edge of a fog.