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

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.”

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.”

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!

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.

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.