Norbert Hirschhorn Holland Park Press (£10) by Warren Woessner Poet Norbert Hirschhorn’s parents fled from Austria just before the Holocaust and resettled in New York when Hirschhorn was ten. He went on to become a social services physician who was honored for developing a treatment for cholera; later in life, he started writing poetry and has published several books. His latest collection, Over the Edge, is not an easy read, but it is compelling. The edge that the poet and his parents go over is from normal life as survivors (albeit temporary ones), toward Hirschhorn’s visionary descript ..read more

Robert DesnosTranslated by Lewis Warsh Winter Editions ($20) by Geoffrey Hagenbuckle In 1922, the Surrealist prodigy Robert Desnos (1900-1945) threatened his friend and fellow poet Paul Eluard with a knife while speak-walking and sleepwalking, singing under hypnosis or in dreams. Though Surrealism’s dream kingdom has been watered down here in the U.S. to advertising, in his 1929 poem Night of Loveless Nights, Desnos imbued love, death, and jouissance, the “little death,” with that tragic magic of his signature themes. A new edition of this truant poem marks the 50th anniversary of its tra ..read more

Joe Hall Black Ocean ($17) by Greg Bem The grotesque yet inquisitive poetry of Joe Hall returns to the limelight in Fugue and Strike. The book has six sections and opens with a short sequence, “From People Finder Buffalo”; its vital poems on the economy and police violence instill in the reader a sense of the core protections of the structures that impose upon our communities and threaten our collective livelihood. Fugue and Strike bursts from the seams through its two largest sections, where Hall brings together distinct series of poems that tackle one large theme: labor. The first, “Fr ..read more

Rob Schlegel Four Way Books ($17.95) by Stephanie Burt I woke up today intending to review Rob Schlegel’s new collection—his fourth, shortest (by line count), and maybe his best. Then I couldn’t find the book for hours, because one kid’s D&D backpack, a bag of dog food, my own undone dishes, and a scheduled Zoom call got in the way. When I finally found Schlegel’s volume, I realized that my distracted, distressed, and familially challenged mood fit the book I wanted to recommend. Childcare is a book about parenthood, household maintenance, and daily life; about maximum distractibility ..read more

Lauren Camp River River Books ($18) by Richard Oyama The artist Agnes Martin slips in and out of Lauren Camp’s An Eye in Each Square like a wraith, an invisible companion. “Must Learn Neither” introduces the book’s tripartite structure and its obsessions: “What I want / is nothing. No meaning, no matter, no more.” Like Martin’s art, Camp’s is private and oblique, not confessional. The poet observes how the artist’s work “made / sacred an emptiness,” and if the poems are ekphrastic, they are also an invocation, a conversation, and the suture of “A line, a line: it never leaves you.” The bo ..read more

Selected Poems Lynn Lonidier Edited by Julie R. EnszerSinister Wisdom ($25.95) by Patrick James Dunagan A prolific poet of the San Francisco small press scene from the 1960s onwards, Lynn Lonidier (1937-1993) is virtually unknown today. No doubt this is due in part to the fact that she didn’t belong to any particular coterie. Even among lesbian poets, the crowd with whom she might most generally be associated, she always went her own way. As Fire-Rimmed Eden: Selected Poems testifies, her work is invariably unique, and all the more valuable for it, as it realizes an idiosyncratic sensibil ..read more

Mike Lala Tupelo Press ($21.95) by Peter Myers “I want a holophrase,” declares Hope Mirrlees—a single word to denote a whole complex of ideas. Thus begins Paris: A Poem, a six-hundred-line eruption of avant-gardism now regarded as a modernist classic. Her holophrase could well be the title itself: “Paris,” in 1920, signified both a classicism on its deathbed and a frenetic, whiplash present, a free-fall into a future as garish and unassimilable as the city’s boulevards, street vendors, and neon lights. Mirrlees’s poem of urban flânerie was an attempt to capture centuries of history and cu ..read more

Tricia Knoll FutureCycle Press ($15.95) by George Longenecker Tricia Knoll’s newest collection One Bent Twig is all about trees, the natural world, regrowth, and contemplation. Images fall one after the other like leaves in autumn. These are skillfully crafted poems, interwoven so each one speaks to the others.  Knoll has connected with trees since she was a child: “I was a baby who grew up next to an elm tree / my father planted to shade my bedroom window.” In “Funeral in the Forest,” she eulogizes ancient maples “with tapping scars, stumps of lost limbs, and brown ridges”: You sto ..read more

Jianqing Zheng Madville Publishing ($19.95) by Michael Antonucci To mark the hundredth anniversary of the Paris Commune in the People’s Republic of China, writers from People’s Daily, Red Flag, and Liberation Army Daily collaborated to produce a thirty-two-page pamphlet entitled Long Live the Victory of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat! In Commemoration of the Centenary of the Paris Commune (1971). Their slim volume celebrates the working-class revolutionaries who briefly seized power at the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War. Published during the fifth year of the Cultural Revoluti ..read more

Selected Poems Joyce MansourTranslated by Emilie Moorhouse City Lights ($22.95) by Allan Graubard Erotic, subversive, sensual, vivacious, defiant, fragile, satirical, ironic, lyrical, eruptive, heretical, anguished, sexy, and buoyant are just some of the words that come to mind when considering the poetry of Joyce Mansour. Certainly there are other words that readers will conjure. Have I left out odorous and sweaty, given Mansour’s embrace of the body as a ground her poems take root in and burst from? And what about her body, the female body, in a world run by men? Add in the complexities ..read more