In Review

Best Books of 2013
John Keene

image of Singing in Magnetic Hoofbeat: Essays, Prose Texts, Interviews, and a Lecture 1997 – 

Will Alexander. Singing in Magnetic Hoofbeat: Essays, Prose Texts, Interviews, and a Lecture 1991 – 2007. Essay Press.

These essays flow out of Alexander’s singular oeuvre, illuminating the politics and poetics of the worlds he and his work inhabit.
image of Hello, the Roses

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Hello, the Roses. New Directions.

One of America's finest living poets offers a distillation of her practice in this new collection, which inimitably brings eye and atmosphere together.
image of TwERK

Latasha N. Nevada Diggs. TwERK. Belladonna.

The collection that truly TwERKs by showing what a multilingual poetry might look and sound like.
image of proxy

R. Erica Doyle. proxy. Belladonna.

Smart, sexy prose poems that chart an evocative affective queer journey in our post-9-11 moment.
image of Autogeography

Reginald Harris. Autogeography. Northwestern University Press.

Shifting between past and present, Harris’s poems provide a map that ranges across a variety of external and interior landscapes.
image of My Daughter La Chola

Farid Matuk. My Daughter La Chola. Ahsahta Press.

A slender volume tuned like several channels playing simultaneously and adroitly yesterday’s and tomorrow’s eventualities.
image of The Big Smoke

Adrian Matejka. The Big Smoke. Penguin.

If you could enter the mind and fists of prizefighter and iconoclast Jack Johnson (1878 – 1946), and the world they moved through, Matejka expertly shows you what you might see.
image of Aux Arcs

Shin-Yu Pai. Aux Arcs. La Alameda Press.

This artist-poet’s newest collection draws upon her deep grasp of the visual and scenic, to create poems and photographs that ripple outwards, from the rural to the global.
image of Study

Yuko Otomo. Study. Ugly Duckling Presse.

Not ekphrasis, not illustration, but the enriching results of an internal conversation between the artist who writes poetry and the poet who makes visual art.
image of Undergloom

Prageeta Sharma. Undergloom. Fence Books.

Subtle and sharp as the needle capturing the starts and shifts of an imagination attentive to beauty and struggle, Sharma’s poems are never gloomy and always gleam.

* * *

John Keene is the author of Annotations (New Directions), and of the poetry collection Seismosis (1913 Press, 2006), a collaboration with artist Christopher Stackhouse. A longtime member of the Dark Room Writers Collective of Cambridge and Boston, and a Graduate Fellow of Cave Canem, he serves on the board of the African Poetry Book Series, under the auspices of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s African Poetry Book Fund and Prairie Schooner, and teaches at Rutgers University in Newark. His translation from the Portuguese of Brazilian novelist Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer will appear in Winter 2013-14 (Nighboat Books/A Bolha Editora).