Omnidawn is pleased to announce some recent reviews and features of our Spring 2012 titles from all over the web, from long-running journals to up-and-coming new blogs, and everything in between:
Mark Scroggins of Culture Industry selected Hillary Gravendyk’s Harm to review earlier this year:
I suppose we’ve been witnessing the full-blown return of the lyric “I” for the last 2 decades or so – and some of course would say it’s never gone away. Hillary Gravendyk’s Harm is an almost unbearably personal sequence of poems, written in the wake of the author’s double lung transplant. “Harm” – the harm of her decade-long pulmonary disorder, the harm of the unimaginably invasive medical procedure that she’s undergone, the psychological harm of living with one’s face to a fundamentally uncertain future – harm is here fused intricately and inextricably with healing, so that the process of healing itself becomes a kind of torture, the hive of bee-stings with every breath taken in.
(Click here to read the full review.)
And, Rachelle Cruz interviewed Hillary for The Blood-Jet Writing Hour:
(Or, if you’d prefer to listen to the interview in a separate window, click here.)
Charles Bernstein at Jacket2 was among the first to review Lyn Hejinian’s The Book of a Thousand Eyes:
Nothing can quite prepare readers for The Book of a Thousand Eyes, just out from Omnidawn. This is Hejinian’s largest scale book – yet it reflects the kind of intimacy – and affective and affecting charm – I associate with all her work.
(Click here to read the full review.)
And Lauren Clark, of the exciting new journal Full Stop, delivers an intriguingly personal and incisive longer review of the book:
Composed and compiled over the course of the past twenty years, The Book of a Thousand Eyesis the long-awaited magnum opus of Language poetess Lyn Hejinian. She’s been publicly reading selections from this book for nearly as long as she’s been writing it, which has given it a slightly mythical status and an eager cult following. She calls it “my most accessible book of poetry.”
Why shouldn’t she? With its declarative dedication to Scheherazade, the collection works to embody and explore the most pervasive, familiar, and individual stories — dreams. It presupposes no background on the part of the reader in Hejinian’s other work, or in literary or critical theory; it only asks that you have, at some point, dreamed.
(Click here to read the full review.)
Paul Hoover’s desolation : souvenir was reviewed in the April 23rd issue of Publishers Weekly:
This new collection by the stalwart experimental poet and editor of the Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology is divided into two sections. In the first, a long series of poems in three stanzas borrows, sometimes, the tones and devices of what might be called “wisdom poetry” to posit with great authority what feels like nothing less than glimpses of nature’s truths and flashes of spiritual wisdom told slant …
(Click here to read the full review.)
And, an excerpt from the book was featured on The International Exchange for Poetic Invention, along with a video of the release reading at Moe’s Books. Click here to see the feature.
The editors at oona conducted this lively, conversational review of Kelli Anne Noftle’s I Was There For Your Somniloquy, winner of the 2011 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize:
(r): O, R. “I designated a lexicon for our time together, but forgot the lingo” (42). Maybe you remember?
R: No matter. “It is inevitable what language will do” (35). What does language do, dear (r), in Kelli Anne Noftle’s forthcoming I Was There For Your Somniloquy?
(r): I think it asks, among other things, what you’ve pointed out–whether what language does, is, in fact, inevitable.
(Click here to read the full review.)
And National Poetry Series award-winner William Stobb consider’s Kelli’s book in a broader context in a review on his blog:
I recently read Kelli Anne Noftle’s debut collection, I Was There for your Somniloquy, and found it challenging, beautiful, substantial–excellent reading. It deserves a full review, and I have made some notes toward one. Here, though, I want to sort out an individual, idiosyncratic moment of reading that connected me to an idea of absence or negation in art: what this blog is mainly about.
(Click here to read the full article.)
And, finally, Bin Ramke’s Aerial received a starred review in the April 23rd edition of Publishers Weekly!
In one of his finest books in a career spanning five decades, Ramke—who is a highly regarded experimental poet, an unflinching recorder of the intimacies between people, and an expert at deploying esoteric knowledge as metaphor—chooses the sky as the guiding figure for his 11th collection of poems.
(Click here to read the full review.)