Poetry Preview Updated
I've added two new titles to the Fall 2010 Poetry Preview--both second books.
Dora Malech, Say So, Cleveland State University Poetry Center
Dora Malech recently received one of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships, which comes with a $15,000 scholarship. This is her second book, following a well-received debut. Hopkins is often cited as an influence on her work, and the alliterative musicality of her poems speaks to that. Her poetic voice, however, is not at all antiquated; a poem published with The New Yorker ends: "Always, some part / of the heart must root for the pliers, some / part for the snow’s steep slope."
Timonthy Donnelly, The Cloud Corporation, Wave Books
This is the highly anticipated second book from Columbia professor Timothy Donnelly, who is the editor of Boston Review. In a recent interview with Publisher's Weekly (who gave his new collection a starred review), he described the process he used to compose a number of the poems in the volume. "This assignment was dreamed up by the poet Geoffrey G. O'Brien, a good friend. Basically he said to write a poem using the words in a chunk of the Patriot Act and, once per line, a word from another text. I picked Bruce Springsteen's 'Born to Run.' Two other poems mashed up Percy Shelley's A Defence of Poetry with a chapter of the 9/11 Commission Report, and Osama bin Laden's 1996 fatwa against the U.S. with the theme song of The Beverly Hillbillies." This intermingling of politics, poetry, and popular culture is characteristic of Donnelly's work as a whole, although this collection is touted as being more personal and more intimate than his last.