Recommended recent readings

violence and splendor

by Alphonso Lingis

Lingis, who has translated and written about Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, is equally a writer and philosopher. In Violence and Splendor, his poetic phrasings, his stylistic innovations (abrupt shifts, correlative personal narratives, photographs, and short meditations that seem to precipitate out from between longer essays), give rise to extraordinarily expansive structures for thinking and feeling. His vigorous explorations of what Americans tend to repress shiver the timbers of Western culture. But the essays are incredibly intimate and they speak intimately. His inquiry is challenge to the soul.

the phonemes

by Frances Richard

Thrilling book and part of a terrific series (which includes Negro marfil/Ivory Black by Myriam Moscona, translated by Jen Hofer) from Les Figues Press. Richard develops a soundtrack typography as part of a uniquely conglomerative poetics. The brilliant closing poem “Shaved Code” embeds into a matrix of conflict between an Earth First activist and the FBI fragments of descriptive lyric, lists, quotation, erotics, economics, and multiple viewpoints. Also worth noting: Richard has written the best “Snake” poem since D. H. Lawrence.

From trinity to trinity

by Kyoko Hayashi, translated by Eiko Otake

Keeping the translation attentive to the odd shifts in verb tense as past and present intermingle, Otake brings across this indelibly vivid account of Hayashi’s journey from Nagasaki, where as an adolescent she survived the atomic bomb, to the New Mexican site where that bomb was engineered.

Luminous epinoia

by Peter O’Leary

Encounters with Peter O’Leary’s poetry are always transformative. The joyful intensity of his visionary meditations reshape language with an incomparable physicality. The poems of his newest book can veer from the sthenic and neo-Baroque to the lucid and memorially actuose. 

War & LOve   love & war

by Aharon Shabtai, translated by Peter Cole

Exactly what the title promises, these poems are collected in series that burn with repugnance for Israel’s role in the ongoing conflict (drawing vociferous criticism for the author in his own country) and then tangle themselves in the soft poignance of intimate relations. As an example of the latter:

IT’S GOOD WITHOUT TANYA

The salmon sandwich

spread with cheese

says to me:

“It’s good without Tanya”

and I don’t throw it away

as I cross the bridge

then eat while walking

along the canal.

English Fragments, a brief history of the soul

by Martin Corless-Smith

Through bird-inflected drizzle and Trahernian light, Corless-Smith meditates on time’s “mediation of reality” and the problem of how to inhabit an intentional life.  The combination of tones-- domestic tenderness charged through with anachronistic formalities-- allows the work to stir into relation “The past and future [which] are beyond us” and the “present self” which “does not exist at all.”