Akron Poetry

In “American Busboy”, a wry anti-mythology, the anti-hero busboy in an anonymous Clam Shack! tangles with the monotonous delirium of work, the indignities and poor pay of unskilled labor, the capricious deus ex machina of mean-spirited middle management, the zombified consumption of summer tourists, while jostling for the goddess-like attentions of waitresses and hostesses—all battered up in sizzlingly crisp wit and language, and deep-fried in a shiny glaze of surreali

Signaletics pits the measured against the immeasurable, the body against identity, and the political against the personal. With a defunct 19th-century body measurement system of criminal identification as a foundation, the poems move in and out of history, only to arrive at the immediate voice of a speaker, distraught about the death of a child brother, the remove of a father, and the estrangement of the personal with the politics of her country.

"Art is about something the way a cat is about the house," says Allen Grossman. This is abundantly true of Emily Rosko's poems in Prop Rockery, a condition she defines with a quote from King Lear: "a looped and windowed raggedness." And while this condition is "pretend," and these poems are indeed virtuoso performances, the despair, loneliness, lies, and miscommunication they examine are as real as anything in art. Parataxis and fragments meet rhyme and chewy-on-the-tongue Anglo Saxon diction at the axis of postmodern irony. Prop Rockery explodes in your mouth-no sugar, plenty of bite. -Natasha Sajé, author of Bend and Red Under the Skin

Groundspeed moves and doesn't stop moving. From pastorals on American highways to self-reckonings after a cancer diagnosis to examinations on grief and transience after the death of a brother, this collection of poems asks readers not only to size up threats but anxieties. Phillips witnesses a small plane crash and examines roadside attractions. She reckons with sexuality after a partner asks for a threesome, and renders a candid portrait of a nude, post-surgery body in a mirror. In this raw and personal book, Phillips insists upon one's own preservation through and beyond grief and trauma.

Jennifer Moore's debut collection takes its title from a bullfighting technique in which the matador draws the bull with his cape; in these poems, however, traditional moves are reconfigured and roles are subverted. In a broader sense, the word "veronica" (from the Latin vera, or "true" and the Greek eikon, or "image") functions as a frame for exploring the nature of visual experience, and underscores a central question: how do we articulate events or emotions that evade clear understanding? In order to do so, the figures here perform all manner of transformations: from vaudeville star to cartoonist's daughter, from patron saint to "Blue-Eyed Torera;" they are soothsayers, apothecaries, curators, often conjuring selves out of thin air. This dilating and "shape-shifting" of perspective becomes a function of identity: "the absorber and the absorbed become one." Indeed, both speaker and listener must be crafted-willed into being-by each other ("Be your own maestro"), and are apparitions until then. Through a flick of the wrist or a trick of the eye, these speakers understand that construction of a self comes only through performance of that self-which performances are often punctuated with a wink, an unswerving gaze, or both at once.

The poems in The Book of Endings try to make sense of, or at least come to some kind of reckoning with absence-the death of the author's mother, the absence of the beloved, the absence of an accountable god, cicadas, the dead stars arriving, the dead moon aglow in the night sky.

Hurricane Party is an original and rewarding work, a masterful follow-up to Big Muddy River of Stars, and a livewire, compelling contribution to American poetry. No other poet sounds like Pelegrin, and that's the sure sign of a writer at the top of her game. -Elton Glaser

Steve Kistulentz's second book of poems, Little Black Daydream, is a chronicle of post-capitalist America. With a precise ear for the American patois, it addresses the uncertainty of the future at the exact moment when those questions are at the forefront of our culture. The book teems with the dazzling detritus of desire, capitalism, and apocalypse-and the poems demonstrate an astonishing adeptness at pushing language to portray this strange moment in our histories, both the personal and the fantastical. --Carmen Giménez Smith, author of The City She Was and Odalisque in Pieces

These are vivid, visceral poems about coming of age in a place "where the Ferris Wheel/ was the tallest thing in the valley," where a boy would learn "to fire a shotgun at nine and wring a chicken's neck/ with one hand by twirling the bird and whipping it straight like a towel." Looking back, the poet wrestles with the meaning of labor in the apple orchards and "the filthy dollars we'd wad into our pockets," or the rites of passage that included sinking a knife into the flank of a dead chestnut horse. In spite of such hardscrabble cruelties-or because of them-there is also a real tenderness in these poems, the revelations of bliss driving along an empty highway "like opening a heavy book, / letting the pages feather themselves and finding a dried flower." In line after line, poem after poem, there is an immersion in the realm of the senses. The poet has a gift for rendering his world in cinematic images: a ten-gallon hat on his head in the second grade is "an upside down chandelier;" carnival workers "snarl into the darkness on their borrowed Harleys."

I know I'm holding a good book in my hand when I use the other to call my friends and read poems to them. How generous John Repp is! He zooms in on the moment, but he's always glancing at everything that surrounds it. His funny poems have dark hearts, just as the sad ones are clearly written by someone capable of belly-shaking laughter. They tell wonderful stories, yet they contain chewy little nuggets that are often indifferent and even hostile to story. I've said elsewhere that a poem either writes you a check or sends you a bill, and Fat Jersey Blues writes me checks faster than I can cash them. Oh, and these poems make me do something else that the good ones always do: when I hung up after reading "Bob Johnson" or "The Maltese Falcon" or "Balcony" to a friend, I sat down to write myself. David Kirby, author of The Biscuit Joint

The Good Kiss is a collection of poems dealing loosely with the subjects of divorce, sexuality, and American culture from the 1950s to today. The poems vary in tone from the fairly serious to the reflective and meditative, to the wryly comic. Perhaps it is fair to say that this range of tones exists within many of the individual poems, and is their defining characteristic. Poems like "What I Want," and "The Good Kiss" are good examples of these quirky, rather unexpected tonal shifts and blendings.