Poetry Notes

Edited by David Bromwich, the newest volume in the American Poets Project, American Sonnets (Library of America, $20 240p ISBN 978-1-59853-015-5), explores this traditional 14-line form through the work of 56 American poets, beginning with John Quincy Adams and ending with contemporary poets such as Adrienne Rich, catching an earthy Robert Frost, a coy Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Stevens at his most musical in between.

In Ulf Stolterfoht’s Lingos I-IX (Burning Deck, $14 126p ISBN 978-1-886224-85-8), trans. from the German by Rosmarie Waldrop, the form and content of the poems are contradictory. While structurally Stolterfoht works in uniform quatrains, the sentences themselves are chaotic, almost always beginning midway, and randomly punctuated, forcing the reader to hit the ground running. The reward is a linguistic patchwork that is both funny and delightfully weird.

Jasper Bernes’s debut, Starsdown (ingirumimusnocte [SPD, dist.], $13 88p ISBN 978-1-934639-02-3), attempts to push language toward its full potential for expression, while constantly admitting its utter failure to express. Where one word fails, two more spring up, whether beckoned by music or meaning—“the unmarketable mouth-feel of your best no”— conveying an urban apocalyptic sentiment where art has been commodified to death.

Linguistic sound and rhythm take precedence over meaning in Figures for a Darkroom Voice (Tarpaulin Sky [SPD, dist.], $14 94p ISBN 978-0-9779019-5-1), a collaboration between prolific poets Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson, illus. by Noah Saterstorm. Half in prose blocks, half in short fragmented lines, these poems are dizzying at best, and elsewhere disorienting as gems like “our garden of let-downs” compete with phrases like “redundancy book math lobby boredom.”

A book-length stream of consciousness poem, Gabriel Gudding’s Rhode Island Notebook (Dalkey, $12.50 456p ISBN 978-1-56478-479-7) records the thoughts of the writer as he travels back and forth between Illinois and Rhode Island to visit his ex-wife and daughter after the rough breakup of his marriage. Though occasionally rambling, and too long, this associative monologue captures the desperation and whimsy of a mind distressed and numbed by the monotony of highway travel.