Larissa Shmaillo's IN PARAN reviewed on Altered Scale Blog

Larissa Shmaillo's IN PARAN (BlazeVox)

“ you see very few men have souls and very few men have courage the few who have the courage to follow their souls are mostly all dead lost in leaves people kill them you know”
—from “Madwoman”

What characterizes this volume of poetry, published in 2009, for me is the astonishing variety of poetics on display. Shmailo proves herself adept at wild internal rhymes, traditional metrics, prose poems, and found poems. The book is divided into three sections: Love Poems, LitCrit, and In the World. I will discuss one poem from each.

[ Read More here at Altered Scale ]

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Book Information:

· Paperback: 68 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN:9781935402107

$16

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July 26, 2012 in Hurray!, Reviews 0 Comments

Captain Poetry’s Sucker Punch by Kenneth Warren Reviewed on Nomadics

Captain Poetry’s Sucker Punch

June 30th, 2012 · No Comments · Book Reviews, Books, Criticism, Poetics,Poetry, Poets

I don’t like Big Beach Novels for the summer, as novels invariably wind up boring me, but I do enjoy having a Big Booke of something-or-other to schlepp around from airport lounge to train station to rental car office — & to whatever home or motel or inn I’ll rest my bones reading, reading, reading. Happy to report that I most likely have found that book for this summer: Kenneth Warren’s Captain Poetry’s Sucker Punch: A Guide to the Homeric Punkhole, 1980-2012, with an introduction by Dale Smith, an afterword by Ammiel Alcalay, & published by Blaze Vox in 2012.

Read the whole review here

Buy the book here

Hurray!

July 3, 2012 in Hurray!, Reviews 0 Comments

Huffington Post review's Michael Smith's Multiverse!!!

June 2012 Contemporary Poetry Reviews

Michael Smith's Multiverse is reviewed in Seth Abramson's Huffpost column for June. Hurray!

6. Multiverse, Mike Smith (BlazeVOX Books, 2010). In the Age of Oulipo, we are conditioned to expect, now and again, a poem or series of poems extruded from some more or less obscure formal constraint; few, however, engage the process as convincingly as Smith, whose anagrammatic poetics is a jacked-up fridge-magnet enterprise in which every poem (at least in the first half of this delightful book, a medieval-style bestiary) must carry the exact same roster of letters. The results are so organic as to be alarming -- a testament to the wit and wisdom of this poet

Read the whole review, and several other fine reviews of hip books, here

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Mike Smith lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with his young daughter and son. A graduate of UNC-Greensboro, Hollins College, and the University of Notre Dame, he has published poetry in magazines such as Free Verse, Hotel Amerika, The Iowa Review, The Notre Dame Review, and Salt. His first full-length collection, How to Make a Mummy, was published in 2008.