(Andrei’s List of Carefully Chosen & Reviewed but Randomly Ordered Titles)

Vladimir Mayakovsky, Night Wraps the Sky, writings by and about Vladimir Mayakovsky, edited by Michael Almereyda. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Finally, a definitive spelling in English of the Russian giant poet's name: it's MAYAKOVSKY. Forget that Majakovsky, Majakovski, and Maiakofsky. Volodya's last name was the reason why this poet was more talked than written about, becoming one of the great "I can say it but I can't spell it" names of 20th century poetry, like many others, Milosz, Akhmatova, and Szymborskaya. Film-maker and litterateur Michael Almereyda has given us back the written Mayakovsky in this muscular collection of well-translated verse and well-chosen writings about the poet of the Russian revolution who influenced Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg among others. Majakovsky committed suicide when the utopia he believed in turned into Lenin's gruesome tyranny. His timing was good. Had he lived on, he'd have been murdered by Stalin. There was just too much life, passion, and rock star charisma to the (literally) giant man who liked to shoot his guns, have his vodka, love women, and declaim before the masses. The poets of glassnost in the 1960s, Yevgheni Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesenski, modelled their poet-rock-star acts on the great V. It is easy to see why the film-maker Almereyda ("Nadja," "Hamlet") would be interested in the Russian futurist: the man was epic, but also brief, intense, and densely surrounded by a cast of dramatic characters.

Bill Berkson, Fugue State, poems, Cambridge, Massachussetts: Zoland Books. Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently, poems, Woodacre, California: Owl Press, www.theowlpress.com. Sudden Address, Selected Lectures 1981-2006, SPD, Cuneiform Press, www.cuneiformpress.com. What's Your Idea of a Good Time? (with Bernadette Meyer), SPD, Tuumba Press, www.spdbooks.org . This cornucopia of Bill Berkson books came to us thanks to an appearance by the poet himself in New Orleans, thanks to Dave Brinks. Berkson gave a spectacular reading at the Gold Mine Saloon, that demonstrated a number of things: 1. the Gold Mine has created a sophisticated audience that can hear with the best of them at St. Marks' Poetry Project or at Intersection, 2. so well can this audience hear, the usually reticent poet bounced forth for an encore, like other astonished greats this year, Ron Padgett, for example, 3. there is a new way to read Berkson after hearing him. I have been a long-time reader and appreciator of the intelligence, music, care, and humor of Bill Berkson's poetry, but this reading gave me new access to his verse. There was always something of a mythical aura about Berkson, the collaborator of Frank O'Hara and one of the chiefs of the New York School whose friends included painters as well as poets. The cover of Fugue State is by Yvonne Jacquette, that of Sudden Address by Philip Guston. Sudden Address, a selection of essays on poetry and painting is a manual for hearing and seeing the works of Philip Guston, Alex Katz, Yvonne Jacquette, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch, among many others. Berkson's constellation of friendships led to profound and useful reflections on their work and constitute, in this book and elsewhere in his work, a solid bridge between the two arts and an enlightening guide to the New York School and, in effect, to the modern proposals of these arts in the last half of the 20th century. The delightful What's Your Idea of a Good Time? is a spacious and joyful collaboration with Bernadette Meyer on the title question. In his dedication to me, Bill asks, "Dear André, What's the worst thing you've ever done? (see p 51) Love, Bill." On p. 51, we find a number of the worst things Bill Berkson has ever done, including: "I was incredibly mean to Frank O'Hara one time: I shouted at him for liking the sound of his own voice too much." Now, anyone who's ever been told that by a dear one, has permission to smile, and that smile will get wider as the implications begin to dawn: Frank O'Hara, the poet who was all about voice is being told by his friend to pipe down. How alive is that? And how much more alive does that make Frank O'Hara, dead now four plus decades? It's not the worst thing Bill has ever done (this bit is No.2 of the worst things), but it's one with cosmic reverb. Berkson's own poetry is subtle and demonstratively abstract in the manner of, let's say, DeKooning: it has an imagistic hardness and lushness that sweeps aside whatever you might have been thinking before you got to: "as if pins were/ to be pushed dimly/ inches downward from/ a manila star." And speaking of pins, the name is Andrei, Bill, not Andrè, it's Romanian not French. That's rude, but not the worst thing I've ever done. Berkson is one of our greatest contemporaries, and shouting at him over a lost letter and a misplaced accent makes me feel great. The new way of reading Berkson's poetry that hearing him granted me, was to regain an intimacy with the work. When distance intervenes, years or miles, one tends to lose one's ear. Hearing him was a joy, and the grace of reconnecting to the page a real jolt & gift.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Coney Island of the Mind, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition with CD of the poet reading. New York: New Directions, www.newdirections.com . Has it really been fifty years? This major American poem sold millions of copies and was, along with Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," the companion of a whole restless generation. Dog-eared copies passed from rebel high-schoolers into hitch-hikers' backpacks into decades of parka pockets and second-hand jackets, and then into the 21st century and the suited academies. For all that handling, the chaplinesque burlesque and the magrittine and duffy-goofesque freshness of the verses keeps us doing summersaults. This edition's destination? ebay, of course (after downloading the cd)

Philip Lamantia, Tau, and John Hoffman, Journey to the End, San Francisco: City Lights, The Pocket Poets Series, No. 59, www.citylights.com. These are the early poems of Philip Lamantia that he was supposed to read at the famous Six Gallery reading in 1955, when Allen Ginsberg read "Howl." Philip had misgivings about these poems, because he didn't think that they were worthy of his newly-found or re-found Catholic faith. From 2008 it's hard to see the problem: "On a smiling crevice of street,/He cuts, for death, the diamond of her eye:/ Star plumed hands put it/Burning on his brow." Sounds pretty Fra Angelico to us. John Hoffman (1928-1952) was Philip's friend who died young and wrote luminous Zen-inspired works. "Therefore unattained is/ The sudden attainment."

Jack Hirschman, All That's Left, San Francisco Poet Laureate, Series No.4, San Francisco: City Lights, www.citylights.com. We suspect that City Lights Poet Laureate Series is a new idea (were there really four California laureates?), but what happens when Laureate No.6 turns out to be a horrible poet, the girlfriend of a state legislator? Anyway, no such problem yet. Au contraire. Jack Hirschman, laureate, sounds just a bit funny to anyone familiar with this radical communist populist poet's later work, and his impeccable street cred. The later Hirschman, as opposed to the early cabbalist, professorial Hirschman, was a North Beach Artaud out to excoriate the petty-bourgeois poet substratum. He'd walk into Vesuvio's and we'd instantly start a semi-good-natured argument about Stalin. "Murderer," I'd understate. "Great man," quoth Hirschman. All of that is, of course, only marginally relevant to the impressive poesy corpus of this energetic and inspired man. In this collection, muscular and raw political outrage is interspersed with hommage to poet-friends now gone, Bob Kaufman and Jack Kerouac.

Tristan Tzara, Chansons Dada, Selected Poems, translated by Lee Harwood, Boston: Black Widow Press, www.blackwidowpress.com. Our man! Long live Dada! Long out of print, this translation reappears at a critical junction in history: leninism is dead except for one or two places, but the Dada spirit flourishes as never before. Now it’s time for someone with great chops to take on the rest of Tzara’s fabulous poetry and boat it over. Tzara’s Dada fame eclipsed the genius of his poetry. Even the French don’t know what they’ve got, since the Oeuvres Complétes is mostly unavailable in France.
Cèsar Vallejo, The Complete Works, a bilingual edition, edited and translated by Clayton Eshleman, with a foreword by Maria Vargas Llosa. Berkeley: www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press. This is the crowning work of decades for Clayton Eshleman, disinguished poet, editor of two of the last half century’s best magazines, Caterpillar and Sulfur, and translator also of Aimè Cesaire, among others. The UC Press did a grand job of publishing the magnum opus of the great South American poet.

Clayton Eshleman, Archaic Design, Boston: Black Widow Press, www.blackwidowpress.com. This is an anthology of the poet’s meditations on his life-long passion for cave art, a fascination that he has pursued by leading lecture tours of paleolithic caves in France and exploring connections between his own subconscious and the first human art.

Andrew J. Lawson, Cave Art, England, 1991, Shire Publications. We received this from William Honrath in view of our known love for caves. Thank you, Bill.

Joanne Kyger, About Now: Collected Poems, Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, www.ume.maine.edu. One of the great complete works that should be in every library. With the addition of this lasting collection of the great California-Zen-Radical-Ecologist-Goddess-of-Light Kyger, we now have in print many collected works of the last half of the 20^th century’s greatest poets. To mention only a few of the books published recently: Ted Berrigan, Collected Poems, University of California Press, edited by Alice Notley with Anselm and Edmund Berrigan, Ed Dorn’s Way More West: New and Selected Poems, Penguin Books, Alice Notley’s Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2005, Wesleyan, Anselm Hollo’s Attractions of Existence: New and Selected Poems 1965-2000, Coffee House Press, Anne Waldman’s In the Room of Never Grieve : New and Selected Poems 1985-2003, Book & CD edition, Coffee House Press, Ron Padgett’s New and Selected Poems, Godine, and Kenneth Koch’s Selected Poems, edited by Ron Padgett, Penguin.

Ron Padgett, How To Be Perfect, new poems, Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, www.coffeehousepress.org. You can’t be a more perfect poet than Ron Padgett. Here is his answer to an interview question: Q: How did you decide on the title How to Be Perfect? A: As you know, there’s a poem of the same name in the book. I’ve always liked titles that begin with “How to.” They promise so much. Years ago I wrote two small books that subvert that promissory tone: How to Be a Woodpecker and How to Be Modern Art. The title poem of this book came from someone who was wistfully drunk and who said to me, “Tell me how to be perfect.” The ludicrousness of such a project intrigued me, just as the ludicrousness of this title pleased me. And it has a certain ring to it.

Mircea Cãrtãrescu, Orbitor, aripa dreapta, Bucharest: Editura Humanitas,
www.librariilehumanitas.ro. This is the “sequel” of an immensely imaginative poetic novel that completes Cartarescu’s vision of childhood and a Bucharest that is no more. Translated, awarded, and praised in Europe and Latin America, Cãrtãrescu has only one book in English, Nostalgia, translated by Julian Semilian, and published by New Directions, www.ndpublishing.com, in 2006. There should be more, this is a world-class writer.

Robert Walser, The Assistant, translated from German by Susan Bernofsky, New York: New Directions, www.ndpublishing.com. This is the first novel of the amazing schizophrenic genius praised by Kafka, Musil, and Walter Benjamin. Musil wasn’t yet diagnosed when he wrote this lovely coming-of-age tale on a dare from his brother. In the mental asylum where he spent most of his life, Walser wrote hundreds of dense pages of prose in a style of tiny script he called “microwriting.” Not all have been deciphered to date, but those that have been, are stupendous.

Gyula Krudy, Sunflower, translated from Hungarian by John Batki, introduction by John Lukacs, New York: The New York Review of Books, www.nyrb.com. This is a sparky English translation of a master of baroque prose and irony who plied his trade in Budapest in the early 20^th century, and was one of a constellation of brilliant and ill-fated writers such as Robert Walser, Bruno Schultz, Joseph Roth, and Kafka.

Peter Freund, A Passion for Discovery, New Jersey: World Scientific, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . A wonderful series of anecdotes about great physicists, by Corpse contributor, string-theorist and distinguished theoretical physicist Peter Freund.

Andrei Codrescu, Femeia Neagrã a unui culcus de hoti, Bucharest: Editura Vinea, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . A bibliophile’s dream, this book has a story Borges would have enjoyed. The last poems I wrote in Romanian were inside a volume by an Italian poetess in 1965-1970. I not only wrote, but I drew over the originals, defaced, and played with languages. And then I promptly lost it in New York in 1970. In 2005, the rare-book librarian at (M)Emory University e-mailed to ask if this odd book that had been donated to Emory was mine. It was. He made me a fast copy and I mailed it to my poet friend Ruxandra Cesereanu, who showed to Nicolae Tzone at Vinea Press, who went to work and produced one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever seen, certainly my most beautiful book, an edition that has both the poems set in type like any poetry book and a facsimile edition of the original Italian book by Renata Pescanti Botti. There are also foldout photographs and other book-art wonders. The actual production took place in a very short time over the internet, with the urgent help of David Faulds and white nights spent making up the eight hour difference between Bucharest and Baton Rouge. The reason for the rush was that Nicolae Tzone wanted to greet me with the finished book when I went to Romania in the Fall of 2007. So much drama and so much symmetry surrounds this book, I almost need to write another book around it. I’m sure I talked at least one book’s worth in various places with various people: where is my Boswell?

Andrei Codrescu & Ruxandra Cesereanu, Submarinul Iertat, Bucharest: Editura Brumar, www.brumar.ro. Another bibliophilic coup! At the same time as the story of the book above was unfolding, I was losing my mind collaborating with “delirionist” Ruxandra Cesereanu, who made me delirious with poetry. This particular de-luxe edition comes signed inside a blood-maroon silk pillow, and was also presented to me during the same trip to Romania in 2007. I read at a Poetry Marathon in my birth town of Sibiu, a breathless event that left me feeling a little like a statue, except that I was wide-awake and exhausted simultaneously. No statue I. We took both books to the Frankfurt Book Fair where they were displayed among millions of other books, so I slowly regained my sense of perspective. I shrank from statue to a mildly pleasant pidgeon. Ruxandra got chased by a mad duck on the bank of the Mein. I believe that the mad duck was the reincarnation of a furious 19th century German Romantic poet who died unpublished.

Mark Spitzer, Riding the Unit: Selected Nonfiction 1994-2004. Pittsburgh: Six Gallery Press. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . The feisty, nay savage, former Corpse Assistant Editor, is in top form here. The huge brou-ha-ha about Ed Dorn that first appeared in Exquisite Corpse is included in here, as well as a lovely memoir of days spent in Paris working, sleeping (a little), and loving at Shakespeare & Company in Paris in the 90s.

Morton Marcus, Striking Through the Masks. Santa Cruz: Capitola Books. The gripping memoir of a marvelous California poet. Included in the series of vignettes of his friends, enemies, and frenemies is the founder of the Corpse, a sympathetic portrait with photo.

Roberto Bolano, Night in Chile, Amulet, Nazi Literature in the Americas, The Savage Detectives, Last Evenings on Earth, New York: New Directions. www.ndpublishing.com. This great Chilean novelist wrote six amazing novels before dying young. He has taken us past the lovely seduction of magical-realism into a new writerly freedom that mixes the breezy elegance of the New York School of poetry with the poetry-steeped souls of Chile and Mexico City. Buy the stuff, it gets you high.

Born in Utopia, An Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Romanian Poetry, edited by Carmen Firan with Paul Doru Mugur and Edward Foster. New Jersey: Talisman Books, www.talismanbooks.org. This is a major anthology by numerous translators of what’s becoming the hippest style around the high-powered world of verse. See American Book Review Romanian focus issue notice in Magazines list.

Carmen Firan, Puterea Cuvintelor (The Power of Words), Craiova: Editura Scrisul Romanesc. www.scrisulromanesc.ro. This essay by the prodigious poet, fictioneer, anthologist, and ambassador for Romanian poetry, is a good insight into the understanding (nearly lost in the over-mediated West) of the power of words.

Ruxandra Cesereanu, Crusader-Woman, poems translated by Adam J. Sorkin with the poet, containing "Letter to American Poets," written directly in English. Introduction by Andrei Codrescu, Afterword by Calin-Andrei-Mihailescu. Boston: Black Widow Press. www.blackwidowpress.com . The first major collection in English by this formidable Romanian poet. To quote from my introduction: "Ruxandra Cesereanu begins her journey at the ur-ground of poetry, the beginning of the begots: 'You are there, and I here.' This is from her Letter to American Poets, written directly in English. 'You are there, and I here' is the first and last human utterance and the first and last line of poetry ever written. The Chinese poets applaud. Ruxandra’s Here is Cluj, Romania, a medieval city where frozen stone knights stand and lie with Gothic stoicism in cathedrals, watching history coagulate, disintegrate, evanesce, and start again. Among them is a Woman Crusader whose story the poet has elicited from dream and chronicle in a conversation that traverses the entirety of her flesh and blood.

Ruxandra Cesereanu, Venetia cu vene violete, Cluj-Napoca: Editura Dacia. Romania’s foremost “delirionist” (a movement she invented in hommage to psychedelics) writes hallucinatory love letters from her favorite city. Venice has already appeared and will continue to make appearances in her poetry and stories, and in here it’s a particularly violent Venice: “Capul ti l-as taia cind ai muri/ ca dar pentru dragostea mea naluca.” (I’d cut off your head when you die/ as a gift for my crazed love.) That is quite believable and I, editor of Exquisite Corpse, know wherefore I speak: I wrote “Submarinul Iertat” (The Forgiven Submarin), an epic-lyric poem in collaboration with Ruxandra, and many were the times when my head was near-rolling. Luckily, we conducted our collaboration by e-mail. After its limited edition by Editura Brumar (www.brumar.ro) in Bucharest in 2008, it will be published by Black Widow Press in the U.S. in my translation in 2009. Head-spinningly frigging incestuous.

Ruxandra Cesereanu, Nasterea Dorintelor Lichide, Bucharest: Editura Cartea Romaneasca, www.cartearomaneasca.ro. This is a book about desire and the body, written for the purposes of both arousing and chastising, a kind of S&M manual by a masterful but perverse poet who uses words as if they were actual skin cells or sperms. The last section of the book classifies types of men, as a kind of feminist response to her contemporary, poet Mircea Cartarescu, who wrote a hugely successful book called, “Why We Love Women.” Cesereanu’s men are drawn rather broadly (haha!), but they do resemble, uncomfortably, some real local dudes who are gunning for her in the newspapers.

Nicolae Tzone, capodopera maxima, Bucharest: Editura Vinea, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . Another gorgeously produced book that is visually and textually a sensual feast. The poet is also the publisher of Vinea books, and as this work shows, quality of writing, visual acuity, and splendid craft, can all bloom in one guy.

Debra Di Blasi, The Jiri Chronicles and Other Fictions, FC2, University of Alabama Press. This is a multi-faceted collection of totally fun and sexy stories and art from a fertile and wild imagination. From choruses to collages, the story of Jiri resonates like a new Good Soldier Sweik.

Eric Basso, Decompositions, Essays on Art & Literature, 1973-1989, and Revagations: A Book of Dreams, Volume I, 1966-1974, Raleigh: Asylum Arts, PO Box 90473, Raleigh, NC 27675. The prolific author we have happily published in past in Exquisite Corpses, is what the French call an homme-de-lettres, a man of letters, a speciae of rara avis these days when writers specialise strenuously (and tediously). Among Eric Basso's meditations in "Decompositions," a title reminiscent of E.M. Cioran's "Un precis de decomposition," are considerations of Alfred Jarry, Flaubert, and Kafka. "Revagations" is a book of surreal-real dreams collected over time like water in barrels in the Sonora desert.

Johannes Göransson, A New Quarantine Will Take my Place, Apostrophe Books, www.apostrophebooks.org . This is a surrealist with meat on his bones, a Swedish naturalist who has taken language and culture as subjects of map-making. "That theater is now a dog facility./ I have a cuckoo in my truerspiel.../ Send in the horselessness we sang about." The musical physicality of this work reminds of the poetry of the late great Jim Gustafson, a very American Detroit Swede, who wrote fearlessly in similarly muscled sentences. If it's a gene, Am Po can use it. Aase Berg, Selected Poems, translated from Swedish by Johannes Göransson, Action Books, www.actionbooks.org . A terrific young Swedish poet brought into the vivid English of Goranson. "Estonia: the Fat's Stone's Transparent Catatonia" is the sound of music the translator smuggles in.

Gunnar Björling, Du Gar de örd, translated from Swedish by Fredrik Hertzberg, Action Books, www.actionbooks.com. This Finland-Swedish modernist is a musical poet whose words look great in the original on the left-hand page, and work well with the English on the right. The term finlandsvensk is a politically charged description of the language and movement of Modernist Finns who wrote in Swedish after the first World War.

Dan Dãnilã, Calendar Poetic, Editura Brumar, Bucharest. www.brumar.ro. A remarkable Romanian poet who considers “singuratatea mersului pe sirma” (the loneliness of tightrope walking). The Corpse will note many books in other languages, especially Romanian, in the hope that our readers who do not speak that (or other) languages, will attempt to become multi-lingual. A language, according to Dr. Sachs, can be learned in two weeks. So what are you waiting for? (Reminder: we need a program to place diacriticals in the right places, or else written Romanian will devolve into bad English!)

Casandra Ioan, Patricia Goodrich, Elizabeth Ray, Bone/ Flesh & Fur// Oase/ Carne & Blana. www.patriciagoodrich.com. Romanians translated.

Fèlix Fènèon, Novels in Three Lines, translated from French and with an introduction by Luc Sante. OK, we notice that the author kept his aigues, but the great Sante (we are big fans!) dropped his. What up? Otherwise, we love the three-line novels of this clerk who discovered Seurat and attended Mallarmè’s salon. New York Review of Books. We also love these re-issues by the NYRB. More!

Magda Cârneci, Art et Pouvoir en Roumanie, 1945-1989, Paris: L’Harmattan, www.librairieharmattan.com. A masterful disssection of the recent corpse of communism by one of our contributors, a major Romanian poet.

Nathaniel Mackey, Bass Cathedral, with a preface by Wilson Harris, New York: New Directions. This epistolary novel is more poetry than story, but it dazzles with supple and sudden language. We forgive its winning the National Book Award: sometimes those guys get it right.

Eileen Myles, Sorry, Tree, Seattle: Wave Books, www.wavebooks.com. We voted Eileen Myles for President in 1992 and would still vote for her. Here is a poem that concerns all of us, it’s called “Jacaranda”: What’s/the feminine/of feet/I didn’t/know I/could/have/a lavender/tree.” If the Corpse has Bill Lavender, you can have a lavender tree, Eileen!

Marjorie Garber, “ (Quotation Marks), New York: Routledge, www.routledge-ny.com. Let it be inscribed here that the Corpse adores Marjorie Garber and that this book is a delight. We also adore Marjorie Perloff, the only other serious poetry critic on our theory diet. We get all the needed critical protein from our two Marjories.

Dumitru Tsepeneag, Art of the Fugue, translation from Romanian by Patrick Camiller, Champaign, IL, Dalkey Archive, www.dalkeyarchive.com. Interlocking mysterious tales by the Romanian-French fictioneer whose work is well-known in Europe. This is his first American publication.

Nina Cassian, Avangarda nu moare si nu se predã, poeme si desene (antologie 1947-2007). Bucharest: Editura Vinea, with an essay by Serban Foarta, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . This is the great nonagenarian Romanian poet’s own selection of her work and drawings. The title alone, “the avantgarde doesn’t die and it doesn’t surrender,” should tell you something about the fierce spirit of this much-loved poet who strode sexily and without false humility through almost the entire 20^th century.

Eugen Jebeleanu, Selected Late Poems, translated from Romanian by Matthew Zapruder and Radu Ioanid. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, www.coffeehousepress.org. Jebeleanu (1911-1991) was an epic poet, much beloved by the communists, like Yannis Ritsos and Nazim Hikmet, but he became a critic of Romania’s dictator in his last decade and wrote biting political verse.

Michael Scarf, For Kid Rock / Total Freedom, Spectacular Books. A political meditation on power and freedom in verse and in acronyms.

Joseph Lease, Broken World, Coffee House Press. A poet who cannot contain either glee nor humor as genuine thinking occurs.

Nicolae Prelipceanu, un teatru de altã natura, (with enclosed CD of poet reading his work). Bucharest: Cartea Romaneasca. www.cartearomaneasca.ro. One of Transylvania’s finest: “am fost azvirlit in zona urletelor fara sfirsit” (I was jettisoned in the endless howl zone). We, too.

Dan Sociu, cîntece excesive, (with enclosed CD of poet reading his poems). Bucharest: Cartea Româneasca. www.cartearomaneasca.ro. We love Sociu’s (b. 1978) visceral verse. “Un fel de vierme intestinal/ne împarte formulare.” (A kind of tapeworm/ is distributing forms to fill). We know that tapeworm: it’s the State.

Dan Sociu, Fratele Pãduche, Bucharest: Editura Vinea, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , is another handsome book from this publisher, and establishes Dan Sociu as the foremost spokesperson for things like worms, fleas, and bed bugs. We don’t have poets like this in English: our tongue stopped somewhere around Ted Hughes’ bestiary. Stopped dead, I mean. We have good cat poets, such as Anselm Hollo, and, if I’m not mistaken, William Pitt Root has written well about his dogs, but that’s it, critter-wise.

Radu Andriescu, The Catalan Within, translated from Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Radu Andriescu. Fayetteville: Longleaf Press. Andriescu is a poet and carpenter: “I think about happiness/ as if it were a piece of lumber.” We used to think of it as a warm gun, but those days are gone.

Dumitru Chioaru, clipe fosforescente, Cluj-Napoca, Editura Limes. This Transylvanian poet from Sibiu is the editor of “Euphorion,” a literary monthly, and an infinitely patient man: “I never hurried destiny – woe is me!/ but at my back someone is collecting traces like sudden mushrooms.” We also know who that is, which is why we don’t turn around.

Island of my Hunger: Cuban Poetry Today, edited and with an introduction by Francisco Morán. San Francisco: City Lights Books. www.citylights.com These are the Cuban poets of today, at a critical junction in Cuba’s history. Here is Omar Perez (b. 1964) writing in English: “I understand, I understand/ But I don’t explain, I don’t explain./” We know, we don’t explain either, but then we don’t feel so much.

Ruth Behar, An Island Called Home, Returning to Jewish Cuba, photographs by Humberto Mayol. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. This is a lovely memoir of a search for lost roots in a country that seems at first to have erased that part of its history. Not so. Ruth Behar finds people and places that have stubbornly refused to fade away.

Rodica Grigore, Lecturi in Labirint, Cluj-Napoca: Casa Cartii de Stiinta, www.casacartii.ro. Labyrinths, mirrors, and masks are this young critic’s passion, and she pursues them in essays about the works of Eliseo Diego, Yasunari Kawabata, Alvaro Mutis, Oran Pamuk, Italo Calvino, Michael Ondaatje, Juan Rulfo, and many others.

Dumitru Radu Popa, Din partea cealaltã, Craiova: Scrisul Românesc. These are esays by a Romanian exile in New York speaking to/from two worlds with charm and rapier wit.

N. Nosirah, God is an Atheist: A Novella for Those Who Have Run Out of Time. Boulder: Sentient Publication. www.sentientpublications.com. In this book, God explains why he’s an atheist.

Satana, Liturgia Infernale, Rome: Societa Edittrice Il Ponte Vecchio. This is Satan’s own text for the use of the prose-impaired.

Iulian Cãnãnãu, O istorie documentarã a SUA, Bucharest: Editura-Agatha, www.biz. It’s weird, but there are a lot of great founding texts of the U.S. that I never read until I found them in this primer for Romanian students by Professor Cãnãnãu. What I learned: natives take for granted “the making of the Americans,” as Getrude Stein put it. Don’t, natives! Use another language if you must, but read The Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of the Confederacy, George Washington’s Farewell, and a few major Supreme Court decisions today! Actually, this is a bilingual book, so you can read them in the original, too.

Rauan Klassnik, Holy Land. Boston: Black Ocean. www.blackocean.com This poet is a Mexican resident who reports “a tiny cactus flowering on the window sill.”

Catherine Pierce, Famous Last Words, Lebanon, NH: Saturnalia Press. www.saturnaliabooks.com This publisher issues handsome poetry books. This collection was selected by John Yau for one of the many poetry prizes (Saturnalia Book Prize in this case) that dot the American litscape frightening and tempting verse-makers. Who knew there was money in poetry? About glory we knew, but it appears lately that heirs to great fortunes die leaving huge money for poetry prizes. The Ruth-Lilly drug empire heiress grew giddy with happiness at having a poem accepted by Poetry Magazine after years of rejection, so she left Poetry sufficient cash to cure drug addiction in the U.S. At this rate of benevolence, Exquisite Corpse, is overdue for several fortunes from our rejectees. Should we become the sudden recipients of largesse, we would immediately pay between $10 to $50 dollars for every poem either not written or not submitted to Exquisite Corpse. If we had enough money to restrain poets the way the government restrains agriculturists, we would breathe a hell of a lot easier (and be able to see a lot farther). We do like C. Pierce’s poesy, forgive the rant. She says: “Remember Moab, Utah.” We do.

Loren Goodman, Suppository Writing, Southampton, MA: The Chuckwagon,
www.valleyarts.blogspot.com This is an excellent manual for poetry teachers.

Tetra Balestri, Cheap Imitations, New York: Green Zone, 66 George Street, Brooklyn, NY 11206. These are cheap imitations of many poets, including Jim Brodey, Anselm Hollo, and Anne Porter.

Aaron Simon, Periodical Days, New York: Green Zone, 66 George Street, Brooklyn, NY 11206. We suspect that Green Zone is a poetry sweatshop run without proper fire insurance by Larry Fagin.

Dorothea Lasky, Wave, Seattle: Wave Books, www.wavepoetry.com. A poet who with gentle irony punctures the quotidian, but not without certain demands: “Kiss me on the lips and hold my breasts.” OK.

Gabeba Baderoon, The Dream in the Next Body, and A Hundred Silences, Cape Town, South Africa: Kwela Books. www.gabeba.com. This South African poet’s books are winners of the Daimler-Chrysler Award for South African Poetry, which reminds the editor that he too is the winner of the GE Younger Poets Award, and leads us all to wonder something-something. Rolex also puts out a lot of dough for poets. Good. Gabeba is a sensual poet who uses blackbirds, salt, and sea waves.

Jane Miller, Midnights, drawings by Beverly Pepper, introduction by C.D. Wright, Lebanon, NH: Saturnalia Books, www.saturnaliabooks.com. We like the black triangle on the cover of this book very much because we think we saw it at midnight last night. The texts here were all written at midnight, and the last line is: “Thank goodness no one can see me looting the dark pouch for the dead mice.” Indeed.

Caroline Knox, Quaker Guns, Seattle: Wave Books. www.wavepoetry.com. We love Wave Books and are big fans of Caroline Knox’ poetry. We are awarding this book “The Exquisite Corpse Funniest Title of the Year Award.” About another of her books I said, “Time doesn’t pass in New England, the library just gets bigger. Reading Caroline Knox one is grateful for her idiosyncratic guidance through the selva of text exfoliated (sometimes) and juxtaposed collagistically at other times. The desire that moves the concentrate sol of these word engines is one more powerful in our world now than it was when the world was smaller, namely “I have to have a book to really read.” I really read this one, and felt no time passing.”

Sharon Mesmer, Annoying Diabetic Bitch, Cumberland, RI: Combo Books, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . This title is right up there with “Quaker Guns,” so we’ll produce another Title Award. We are mighty partisans of Ms. Mesmer, the great-granddaughter of Dr. Mesmer, the Magnet Man. Sharon Mesmer, The Virgin Formica, New York: Hanging Loose Press. Allen Ginsberg called Mesmer "vivaciously modern," which we misread as "viciously modern." She is, totally. For instance: "Okay, I was loose/foundering even,/a drifting archipelago of estrogen and cigarettes/in the glow of the southern eroticc gardens." If we had only known her then!
Douglas A. Martin, In a Time of Assignments, Soft Skull Press, www.softskull.com. It’s been a while since a good old gay book of verse showed up in our offices, but here it is, at last. “The absent roommate’s towel not quite red, or pink.” That’s pretty gay.

John Olson, Backscatter: New and Selected Poems, Boston: Black Widow Press, www.blackwidowpress.com. The Black Widow Press project began with the re-issue of unavailable Surrealist work by Andrè Breton, Tristan Tzara, Paul Eluard, Gherasim Luca, and others, and has grown to include some of the most monstrous poets working that vein today, including Clayton Eshleman, Ruxandra Cesereanu, and John Olson. We enter Olson’s world with some trepidation, and for good reason: he’s fabulous and sticky, “music teeming with intimation,” as he puts it.

Ioan T. Morar, Cartea de la Capãtul Lumii, Noua Caledonie: la un pas de Paradis, Bucharest: Editura Polirom, www.polirom.ro. This is a beautiful novel about an odd utopia by a distinguished journalist, who is also one of Romania’s most prolific writers. The Devil puts in an appearance.

Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Susan Bernofsky, New York: New Directions. This is a contemporary German novel, a field we haven’t kept up with since Gunther Grass. We trust New Directions, however, so go Erpenbeck!

Marlena Braester, oublier en avant/ uitarea dinainte, Bucharest: Editura Vinea, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . This is a bi-lingual (French & Romanian) book of an Israeli-French-Romanian poet whose specialty is listening to silence and discerning its nuances and depths. “în inima pietrii/ cea mai densã obscuritate/ au coeur de la pierre/ la plus dense obscurité.” (At the heart of stone/ the thickest darkness.) Vinea is Romania’s foremost publisher of avantgarde and contemporary poetry. The editor, Nicolae Tzone, is himself a poet, and he takes extraordinary care with his books, which are always a visual treat.

Gordon Ball, Scenes from East Hill Farm, Seasons with Allen Ginsberg, Coventry, England: Nr. 13 in The Beat Scene, www.beatscene.com. Gordon Ball, a good friend of Allen and eminent photographer of Allen’s circle, spent time in the poet’s putative paradise at East Hill Farm, and writes about it with warmth and humor. “”by midsummer we were surrounded by a burgeoning animal population – African geese, Muscovy ducks, Polish hens and other chickens, a jersey cow, a fast horse, milk goats, two dogs, morning doves, cats.” He was also there when Allen received the tragic call telling him that Jack Kerouac had died.

Eddie Kerouac-Parker, My Life with Jack Kerouac, edited by Timothy Moran and Bill Morgan, San Francisco: City Lights Books, www.citylights.com. Edie Parker was eighteen years-old when she met Jack Kerouac at Columbia in 1940. This is a wonderful memoir of a girl in love. When she wrote it, Edie Frankie Parker was no longer a girl, and her love, Jack Kerouac, was long gone. But Edie, or Frankie as her intimates called her, remembered everything about her brief marriage to Jack, as if a bubble of resilient sunshine had encapsulated those few years during World War 2, and kept intact every detail. She remembers what they ate, what they wore, what movies they saw. Her Jack Kerouac was young, handsome, a lover of fun, and a would-be writer. He stayed so in her memory and though she alludes occasionally to the alcoholic monster that emerged in later years, that creature doesn’t live here. In these pages we meet the young genius of just before “On the Road,” adored by all and loved by her most of all. The flavor of the war years with all their privations and mad hopes wafts from these pages freshly, like an Atlantic breeze, and makes one wonder, finally, what might have happened if Jack had settled down with Frankie, instead of following the turbulent destiny that changed America.

Adrian Sângeorzan, Over the Lifeline, New York: Spuyten Duyvil Press, www.spuytendyvil.com. This New York obstetrician and gynecologist writes fiction, memoir and poetry with equal ease in Romanian and English.

Cartea cu Bunici, editor Marius Chivu, Bucharest: Editura Humanitas. www.librariilehumanitas.ro. This is a collection of reminiscences and considerations on the subject of grandfathers and grandmothers by many fine Romanian writers. I was mightily amused and moved (because I speak Romanian), but someone should follow suit with an anthology about grandfathers in English.

Pete Hautman, Sweet Blood, a young adult novel, New York: Simon Pulse. www.SimonSays.com . You wouldn't think the Corpse would let a teen vampire book this good go unnoticed, did you? Especially since we find this internet exchange herein, after being informed by one of the characters that "Transylvania started off as an offshoot of a local Goth Web site," and then get the following, from the site: "Sblood: anybody know where Draco's from? 2Tooth: N. Sblood: eve meet him F2F? 2Tooth: I think he's from New Orleans. He knows Anne Rice. Roxxxie: Not New Orleans. I know all the Big Easy vamps. Vlad714: What r you guys talking? Sblood: Draco. Where he's from. 2Tooth: Why not ask him? Sblood: He's not here, unless he's lurking." Guess what?
Seeing Los Angeles, A Different Look at a A Different City, edited by Guy Bennett & Bèatrice Mousli, Los Angeles: Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, www.gw.otis.edu. Los Angeles is an evolving world of three million people sitting on a powder keg, and this collection of essays by thoughtful writers, reveals this amazing city under many lights. We knew something, but honestly, we didn’t know just what a complex beast L.A. is. I’d like to go back soon. The publishers of this anthology are also hosts to the new review of literature, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , one of the best mags going these days. Whatever they’ve got at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles (except cash) they should put in the water. It works.

Nicholas Kostarides & Mary Richardson, New Orleans Bicycles, New York: Mark Batty Publisher, www.markbattypublisher.com. This is a charming collection of photographs of the bicycles of New Orleans, those lovely art works of the Vieux Carre on which fly the new bohos, trailing glitter and wonder. I immediately know where I am on this big, cold orb when I cross Esplanade and see my first bicycle boho. Yo, we here, this is the place!

Mary Kite, The Bamboo Librarian, Santa Cruz: Blue X Press, www.bluepress.com: “(now is the time for drink).” We agree.

Albert Flynn DeSilver, Letters to Early Street, Albuquerque: La Alameda Press. This is one of our poets and we stand behind him (or to his side) in any fight, physical or literary, he might be involved in. Except maybe in the situation he describes thus: “A stuffed mouse has just capsized in my bed.”

Thomas Laird, Into Tibet: the CIA’s First Atomic Spy and His Secret Expedition to Lhasa, New York: Grove Press. This is an amazing true story by the man who brought you the first intimate look at the Dalai Lama in The Story of Tibet: Conversations with the Dalai Lama, New York: Grove Press. We spent a fascinating hour in the man’s company, in New Orleans, the only place in the U.S. you could safely settle in after decades of living in Nepal.

Mark DeCarteret, (If This Is the) New World, Greensboro, NC: www.marchstreetpress.com. The poet says “I was reading a book about fingerprints,” and one of those prints is in the Exquisite Corpse.

Poets Bookshelf II, edited by Peter Davis and Peter Koontz, Seattle: Barnwood Press, www.barnwoodpress.org. This is a book about what poets influenced the poets in the book in case somebody wants to be a poet like one of the poets in the book and read all the books that influenced that poet – that’s known in the trade as a Circle Jerk. I’m in this book saying something to the effect that too many people influenced me to sort them out now, plus I’ve influenced a lot of the people that were in both. Vol I and II, but they are too pretentious to know it, so they pretend that they were influenced only by people like Guy Debord and Edmond Jabès, which sounds really impressive, esp. since I am reasonably sure that they haven’t read more than one page of these resonant names’ works. Most poets are not only liars, but have an inflatable organ that swells them to ten times their real size as soon as you ask them a question like, Who Influenced You?, which makes them the size of squirrel poop (inflated).

Ryk McIntyre, Love Is a Flashlight, Sacred Fools Poetry, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . This guy is great: he wrote “Yo, Hamlet,” and I’ve seen him perform it. It’s a hoot.

Uncensored Songs: A Sam Abrams Tribute, festschrift gathered by John Roche in honor of great rad friend/poet Sam Abrams. Contributors include Amiri Baraka, Tony Weinberger, and many others. We bow before Sam with delight & love.

Norene Cashen, The Reverse is also True, Detroit: Doorjamb Press, www.doorjambpress.org. See her poetry in this issue. Or, as blurbed by editor: “Norene Cashen ‘s poems are sad and beautiful, they remind me of why I’m sometimes afraid of poetry.”

Dominique Fabré, The Waitress Was New, translated from French by Jordan Stump, Brooklyn, NY: archipelago books, www.archipelagobooks.org. We love this press. They make beautiful books. This is a charming little novel about the marginalised working people of Paris, a light intersection of Queneau and Zola.
Alex Lemon, Hallelujah Blackout, Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, www.milkweed.org . What will happen the day when we like all poets? Will that be the day when we won't be able to open our White Goddess (i.e, the refrigerator, as per T. Berrigan) because it will be so covered by poems taped there, the door will not be evident. We do like Alex Lemon, published on acid-free recycled paper in a handsome volume by this respectable publisher, and we are bewildered by how much fine poesy zings across the bows of our overextended nerves. And I'm not talking about the nerves of the Corpse, but all the nerves of all the poetry readers in English. Let's not make Alex Lemon a scapegoat, though: he's splendid: "I wish I might be different but I am/ That I am and all I have are my legs."

MAGAZINES

Callaloo, American Tragedy: New Orleans Under Water, a special issue, Vol. 29, No.4, edited by Charles Henry Rowell. The Johns Hopkins University Press. This is an extraordinary collection of original writings, documents and photographs of the 2005 Katrina tragedy. The vast range of interviews, writing and art work make this an indispensible and historic anthology.

Xavier Review, Volume 26, Nr. 1-2, edited by Richard Collins, www.xula.edu/review, a Katrina issue that gives the Catastrophe its rightful gravitas with works by David Brinks and many others.

House Organ, edited by Kenneth Warren, Lakewood, Ohio, is the best print poetry monthly in the U.S. You wouldn’t know it by looking at it, but its retro look (no website) belies its rich crême-de-la-crême contents. Among the contributors: Jack Hirschman, Harrison Fisher, Vincent Ferrini (goodbye, great old man of poesy!) and many, many others.

live mag Nr.4, edited by Jeffrey Wright, publishes Sheila Lanham, Hugh Seidman, Kimiko Hahn, Sparrow, Marc Nasdor, Amiri Baraka. PO Box 1215, Cooper Station, NY, NY 10276

American Book Review, January/February 2008, University of Houston-Victoria, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . Special focus on contemporary Romanian poetry, edited by the editor of the Corpse, who managed to offend many of his friends and incur the enmity of many others he hadn’t read.

kadar koli, Nr. 1, editor David Hadbawnik, www.habenichtpress.com, publishes Sarah Peters, Hoa Nguyen, and Dale Smith, among others. That’s good enough for us, so you habe a bunch, nein?

Stop Smiling Nr. 34, The Jazz Issue, featuring ORNETTE! and a Tribute to Eric Dolphy. One of our favorite mag titles, and one of the Corpse’s kin. www.stopsmilingonline.com

Mineshaft Nr. 21, Spring 2008. Contains R. Crumb, Bill Griffith, Harvey Pekar, Bruce Simon, Diane diPrima cartoonized by M. Fleener for the upcoming History of the Beats in cartoon form. What more of the best of the still-pulsing “refuse-to-be-burned-out” Sixties do you want? www.mineshaftmagazine.com

Constance Nr. 2: Delicate Burdens. One of the most visually stimulating print magazines we’ve seen. Art and text are linked beautifully in an hommage to New Orleans, with poetry by Dave Brinks, Susan Gisleson, Andy Young, Megan Burns, stories by Michael Patrick Welch, C.W. Cannon, art by Tim Best, Skylar Fein, Faub.org, Musa Alves, and many others. www.weareconstance.org Noon, 2008, editor: Diane Williams, 1324 Lexington Avenue PMB 298, New York, NY 10128. This is possibly the most elegant literary journal published in the U.S. today: current issue features a fabulous zebra cover. (And we don't say "fabulous zebra" frivolously). The contents aren't shabby either: among contributors are Lydia Davis and Monica Manolescu-Oancea, a Romanian essayist unknown to us whose presence we signal as part of our ongoing effort to grease the Carpathian-American axis.