Adam Fitzgerald

Enter into the arena Kate Durbin, whose latest book, E! Entertainment has just been published by Wonder Books, demonstrating seven years of atomically precise attention paid to the linguistic ecosystem of reality television. Deliciously designed in the prettiest of pink pages by Joseph Kaplan, E! Entertainment arranges, annotates, reports, and represents our favorite national pastime…

Berl’s Poetry Shop located in Dumbo has emerged from nowhere it seems to become one of the most exciting venues for poetry in New York City. No easy feat considering the long-standing wealth of options. Owned and operated by poets Jared White and Farrah Field, Berl’s features an exhaustive inventory of poetry titles and chapbooks from small presses and independent publishers…

The result is a sharply integrated and commanding whole, a triptych of love, poetry and grief orchestrated around the time in which each section was written: the June before, the August during, and the months after his mother’s death.

Forgive the phrasing, but this is one of the inevitable questions that arises when reading Dodie Bellamy’s exhilarating Cunt Norton, which splices classic poems from the Norton Anthology of Poetry with unattributed pornographic texts…

Extending 20th century collage’s greatest techniques and mannerisms, Jess is the unlikely collision of print culture and poetry, Victorian and mid-century American esoterica, mainstream advertising and underground smut.

We are used to hearing these terms derogatorily regarding poetry of less than exemplary literary value; perhaps suggesting either clumsy or downright ugly rhythms: inept, sentimental, misordered, trivial, cliché. But what if a poem’s great literary value is rather because it embraces these taboo registers, willingly, wildly, playfully?

Into the dusk-charged air of such words lies the vegetable kingdom of Keats and Schuyler, the textural-as-sculptural in Nutter’s arsenal. Like a calmer Dean Young, what lies beneath Nutter’s titles reveals an intersection of quietude and zaniness. Sensualists rejoice! Lovers of language’s eerie physicality. Oglers of its draping of shapely phrases with imaginary weight…

That is, the neighborhood working stiffs of northern New Jersey, its chummy losers and benign perverts, the children of the American 1970s where labor was still a mainstay even as popular culture was only beginning to whitewash this country’s regionalism (i.e. Frost’s much fetishized provincial sound) into a media-ted, medicated, middle-going American suburbia…

What a year for prose! As a poet myself, this might sound partly like a concession, but many of the prosaic tones, long lines or paragraphs that I’m thinking about were ones found within poets’ volumes…