Third Factory: My Attention Span

Thanks to Steve Evans of Third Factory for including me in this year’s Attention Span.

Below is my list that I submitted a few weeks (months?) ago, of work currently on my radar, in my head, and/or on my reading list (if you read my blog, you already know this):

Suheir Hammad | breaking poems | Cypher Books | 2008

Paul Martínez Pompa | My Kill Adore Him | University of Notre Dame Press | 2009

Sesshu Foster | World Ball Notebook | City Lights Books | 2009

Eduardo Galeano | Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone | Nation Books | 2009

Maiana Minahal | legend sondayo | Civil Defense Poetry | 2009

Adrian Castro | Handling Destiny | Coffee House Press | 2009

Bay Area Filipino American Writers, eds. | Without Names | Kearny Street Workshop | 1985

Frances Chung | Crazy Melon and Chinese Apple | Wesleyan University Press | 2000

Walter Lew, ed. | Premonitions | Kaya/Muae | 1995

Dean Francis Alfar | The Kite of Stars | Anvil Publishing | 2007

Linda Hogan | Dwellings | Norton | 2007

Poetry Foundation: Rachel McKibbens

My 16th post, Rachel McKibbens, Pink Elephant (Cypher Books, 2009), is up at the Poetry Foundation blog. Here is an excerpt:

Rachel McKibbens’s lovely and serrated debut collection, Pink Elephant (Cypher Books), reminds us why poetry as testimony is so necessary. Ex-punk rock chola and mother of five, 2009 Women’s Individual World Poetry Slam champion Rachel McKibbens writes about abandonment and abuse in stark, startling language and well-wrought fable, delivered in well-paced lines, laying bare the history of a woman who’s “fed [her] body to the hungry for years.” [Read more, and please do leave a comment if you are so moved.]

Poetry Foundation Blog: Craig Santos Perez reviews Tara Betts

My 14th post is up at the Poetry Foundation blog. Actually, I’ve happily given over the space to Craig Santos Perez’s review of Tara Betts’s debut poetry collection Arc & Hue.  An excerpt:

The funniest poem is an interactive piece titled “A Survey on Enjoying Verse.” One of the survey questions asks where the reader last heard poetry read aloud (“please mark YES or NO” with a “No. 2 Pencil only”):

4. Alone in a smoky bar while wishing your sorry ass lover would take you back.
5. At a poetry slam since that’s how you get to go on tour and hawk the CDs you just burned and the chapbook with your picture on the front.
6. At a respected literary organization or conference so academes, publishers, and editors know you’re a REAL poet. (77)

I’ve never seen Betts alone in the smoky bar that I usually hang out in wishing my sorry ass lover would take me back; Betts’s picture nests modestly on the back cover of the book beneath blurbs by Martín Espada, Annie Finch, and Wanda Coleman; does anyone really consider AWP a “respected literary organization or conference”? For real, all one has to do is read Arc & Hue to know that Betts is a REAL poet. Not only does she write about a diverse range of expansive themes, but she also grounds these themes in her past and present experiences. The poems illuminate the smallest domestic moments (whether filled with violence or love) alongside larger cultural issues. While Betts writes mostly in free verse, this collection contains many well-crafted sonnets, a villanelle riff, a sestina, and a vibrant canzone.

Read more.