Claudia Rankine: Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)
Filed under poetry | Tags: · race
“Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seemingly slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV—everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named “post-race” society.”
Publisher Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2014
ISBN 9781555976903, 1555976905
169 pages
Reviews: Holly Bass (NYT), Nick Larid (NYRB), Dan Chiasson (New Yorker), Kate Kellaway (Guardian), Kenna O’Rourke (Adroit).
Commentary: LA Review of Books, (cont.).
Publisher’s resource page for book
Wikipedia
Publisher
WorldCat
Daniil Kharms: The Blue Notebook (2004)
Filed under poetry | Tags: · avant-garde, poetry
A book of short poetic fragments by the Russian poet and dramatist Daniil Kharms.
Translated by Matvei Yankelevich
Afterword by Branislav Jakovljevic
Publisher Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, NY, 2004
Fourth edition, Dec 2005
Eastern European Poets series, 6
pages
via publisher
Christian Bök: Crystallography (1994/2003)
Filed under poetry | Tags: · concrete poetry, language, pataphysics, poetry, science, visual poetry
“Crystallography’ means the study of crystals, but also, taken literally, ‘lucid writing.’ The book exists in the intersection of poetry and science, exploring the relationship between language and crystals – looking at language as a crystal, a space in which the chaos of individual parts align to expose a perfect formation of structure. As Bök himself says, ‘a word is a bit of crystal in formation,’ suggesting there is a space in which words, like crystals, can resonate pure form.”
First edition published 1994
Second edition, revised
Publisher Coach House Books, Toronto, 2003
ISBN 1552451194
157 pages
via ExP
Reviews: Darren Wershler-Henry (2001), Adam Golaski (Open Letters Monthly 2007), Ian Rae (Canadian Literature 2011).
Commentary: Nathan Brown (2004), James Elkins (2014).
PDF (removed on 2016-8-16 upon request of the publisher)
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