Measuring Tape For The Midwest
Noah Falck
Pavement Saw, 2008
$7.00
The conversational tongue that resides inside Measuring Tape of the Midwest is the one that brings these poems together. Imbued with trenchant humor, incongruous ideas are released from the poet’s endless register of imaginative images that indulge in the very best of American miscellany. Reading these poems one gets the sense he is rewriting history (“today is a new version of yesterday“), employing his paraphernalia as tools for building upon the melancholic everyday, a process that overall proves to be most profound. [Brian Foley]
Spring
Oni Buchanan
University of Illinois Press, 2008
$17.95
In Spring, Oni Buchanan does not shy from taking on larger metaphysical themes or delving into the didactic. Her verse comes in uncommon variety— often built with a strong sense of form, other times as experiments in visual and grammatical breaks calling to mind the playfulness of Cummings, or going even further to rely on the pure mathematics of language to do the heavy lifting. If none of these things puts you off, you will likely enjoy this book. [R. Clark Morrow]