Books

The Spooking of Mavens

To steal from another poet of the South: "It's like ladling soup and a horse comes out." Talk about surprise... I remember the old Lucipo list, where I first encountered Tim Earley. In the sometimes fraught discussions of that space, he always seemed perfectly reserved and reasoned: a young gentleman unruffled by the psychic and lexical excitements exploding about. So whereof this sudden Southern Gothic of lyrical extremis and gorgeous shock, I have no clue. I for one, have never seen anything like it. This is wild, major work, as you will see. And it's entirely right that its poet hails from Yoknapatawpha County.
--Kent Johnson

What would you get if you crossed French postmodern theory with an Appalachian Southern stock(car)? Tim Earley and this book, a book of poetry as dense as kudzu, the prolific half-mad fully strange quite funny alphabetic riffing alive in & enlivening a truly New South. A rich crazy book propelled equally by the engines of love and anger, a restless intelligence honking & screaming & improvising a new hymn of place, rich in the nutrients of an omnivorous vocabulary, pointing the way to stagger, dance, and run through “another embittered paradise,” asking “is there a self in the belly of the beast?"
— Hank Lazer, author of The New Spirit and Portions

What happens when poetry becomes a thrilling late night conversation? The co-authored poems in Morphs explore new ways of thinking and writing and living that were always available for people willing to take the risk of responding to each other. The back and forth leaps, jump cuts, and startling juxtapositions in these poems offer not discrete poetic reveries of a lyric voice in standardized isolation but poetry as the electrifying weave, slant, and break of writers creating their own common ground. Always darting at the edge of what can and can’t be said, these poems reveal, finally, the tremendous excitement that can come from being involved in the life and words of others.
-- Mark Wallace

The poetry of Morphs features a committed conversation this reader experiences as occurring in layers, pricks, grace notes, simulated dance steps, and thick sliding scales. The authors’ pleasure in inventing ways to communicate à deux across geographic distance is always in evidence. While formally inventive, the interpersonal world of these poems is rich in content and serious play.
-- Carla Harryman

Morphs is a poetics of “Beginner’s Mind.”
-- Christian Peet

About Map of the Hydrogen World:

Map of the Hydrogen World, Steve Halle’s first collection of poems, shuns the so-called divide between post-avant and Official Verse Culture poetics by embracing traditional forms and themes while simultaneously developing new ways of knowing and working through poetry. From traditional lyric and narrative poems to formal experiments, investigations and cuttings, Halle attempts to find his own way through place, history, art, politics, faith and self, mapping particulars as small as an atom and universalities as big as a world.

Praise for Map of the Hydrogen World:

Ginsbergian incantation, high modernist allusion, the post-avant rhizome and the documentary collage — these are the weapons in Steve Halle’s arsenal. Joyce, Eliot, Emerson, Whitman and Keats shoot through the static of text-messaging, global positioning systems, surveillance culture, and an urgent sense of the world’s victims. Halle carries a humanistic heritage into an inhuman world. It comes out shredded, torn into the bandages we need even more than we know.
— Robert Archambeau

Delightful voices and moves play out in the latitudes & longitudes of Steve Halle's Map of the Hydrogen World. Edgy with savvy and brio. It's one wonderful exciting romp.
— Anne Waldman

Edward Teller once shook my hand and told me, “The world is flat, my friend.  But it’s the edges that get caught in your eye.”  Here, Steve Halle has plucked the edges from the world, Teller’s eye from its roulette wheel, the green electricity from its river.  Halle’s poems are hollers in the hallway, smoke between bricks.  A very public burning.
  — Garin Cycholl

Praise for Rafetown Georgics

There’s much to be learned here. At this long moment—this book—in Garin Cycholl’s continuing project the prairie’s a verb (“light cracked and/ prairied”), the landscape of the Midwest “a haggard trophy”; these pages tangle exquisitely with the varieties of distance and from South-of-70 to the city of the big shoulders and beyond, the work teases belief out of chrome, tours the nature of vipers, and traces (and burns) the blue in green. Rafetown Georgics is a confidence of practical matters (rural and otherwise), a jukebox of voices telling wonders, an astonishing book.

— C. S. Giscombe

Garin Cycholl’s georgics are the rustic songs and ditties of those who work the earth. (Geo = earth; ergon = work.) Obsessive listing of the objects of the earth—from its plant names to its place names to the makes of the automobiles that its laborers crisscross it with—is Cycholl’s mode in Rafetown Georgics, from out of which he represents American landscapes with a perfect, weary, and witty clarity, “a field, / planted with stones, even the words broken, me / a lingering god.” This is holy, ancient poetry.

— Peter O’Leary

This anthology brings together a sampling of some of the best poets working in Chicago and the surrounding region. From all corners of the city, these poets are crafting a voice for Chicago literature in the new century.

The book contains work from the following poets:

Jennifer Scappettone * Suzanne Buffam * Srikanth Reddy * Robyn Schiff * Nick Twemlow * John Tipton * Eric Elshtain * David Pavelich * Peter O’Leary * William Fuller * Michael O’Leary * Mark Tardi * Erica Bernheim * Michael Antonucci * Chris Glomski * Garin Cycholl * Luis Urrea * Kristy Odelius * Lina Ramona Vitkauskas * Simone Muench * Lea Graham * Ed Roberson * Arielle Greenberg * Tony Trigilio * Shin Yu Pai * Dan Beachy-Quick * Maxine Chernoff * Kerri Sonnenberg * Jesse Seldess * Paul Hoover * Michelle Taransky * Robert Archambeau * Bill Marsh * Larry Sawyer * Cecilia Pinto * Johanny Vázquez Paz * Ela Kotkowska * Jorge Sanchez * Joel Craig * Daniel Borzutzky * Joel Felix * Raymond Bianchi * Cynthia Bond * William Allegrezza * Jennifer Karmin * Tim Yu * Laura Sims * Roberto Harrison * Brenda Cárdenas * Stacy Szymaszek * Chuck Stebelton.

Praise for The City Visible.

When Carl Sandburg asked in his Chicago Poems, close to a hundred years ago, for "a voice to speak to me in the day end, / A hand to touch me in the dark room / Breaking the long loneliness," little did he know his city would be so fully and livingly answered and so honored. Chicago is again transformed by poetry. Here in these myriad acts of imagination, the poets of The City Visible give to it again, in Shakespeare's terms, :a local habitation and a name."
--Peter Gizzi

The most exciting and satisfying anthology I’ve acquired in the past month is The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century . . . It not only is easily the best anthology I’ve ever seen that tried to capture the lively scene of the Second City, but it’s a worthy companion to Stephanie Young’s Bay Poetics, which for my money is the gold standard in contemporary poetry anthologies, especially ones that offer a regional focus.
--Ron Silliman

There's a lot of fantastic writing here . . . there s a diversity of expression that makes it a fantastic sourcebook.
--Simon DeDeo

The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century is a prudent investment for any reader of contemporary poetry . . . the book is a nice, hearty, earnest sampling of interesting poets. --Olivia Cronk, Bookslut

The City Visible makes a strong case for Chicago's current vitality and emerging prominence within the national poetic community.
--Fred Muratori, The Boston Review.

Unveiling an entire new poetic culture may seem like the act of a master magician, but Allegrezza and Bianchi have been on the case a long time and they know what they're doing. Volume Two is said to be in the works, and in the meantime I for one will be ordering several copies of Volume One for students, friends, and family relations. When young poets ask me, where should I go, what should I do, nowadays I always say pull out a map, throw in a dart. X marks the spot, but Chicago is the most exciting scene around. Years from now we'll be looking back at the early 21st century and wishing we'd all relocated there at this time in poetry history. "Zigzag is the mind's progress," as Paul Hoover wrote, *perhaps* in Chicago, "and stabs at every tree" ("Poetics, page 143).
--Kevin Killian

Time Out Chicago lists it as one of the 5 best Chicago poetry books.

Praise for Edging.

--Rod Smith

In this deeply moving first collection, Michelle Noteboom takes a rigorous, relentless, and compassionate look at the body in its most vulnerable moments. Focusing on skin---as a wave in which the body breaks against the world, as a screen on which our most intimate communications are written---she probes human possibility, revealing how it can betray humanity, but also, how, ultimately, it returns to it.

--Cole Swensen

Michelle Noteboom’s poetry traverses boundaries, created and imposed, with a fierce inquisitiveness that unearths our constant physical and psychological vulnerability in spite of, but also because of, our agency in the marking and manipulation of the human form. Edging, as both process and object, flirts with that tenuous space between objects, bodies—that shape-shifting realm where one can only “touch it now, then awake.” Noteboom’s poetry holds the ‘surrogate self’ under examination, and the future of the body is suddenly, urgently drawn close. This is a fearless and captivating debut.

--E. Tracy Grinnell