It's about that time—back to school, that is, for the folks at
Dislocate. Trying to get some good summer reading in before it becomes fall reading. Here's what's been on the proverbial reading plate:
Jake Adam York's
Murder Ballads is a treat. At times elegiac, at times meditatively haunting, the 35 poems unfold like some secret history. The poems speak to the South—lynchings and George Wallace, church bombings and Andrew Jackson—but there is also mud and air and night and a radio where "you can hear the dead whispering through." It's an amazing first book.
Go read some (and listen, too).
Ornithologies, by Joshua Poteat, is full of the beautiful, the lyric, the narrative—many times all at once. How can you not dig a six-part poem titled, "Meditations in the Margins of the Book of Irish Curses"? His writing/syntax/all-that-jazz is hypnotic. Like York's work, Poteat's is of the earth, and not necessarily a comforting one. Familiar? Yes. Sweetly sad? Check. But bucolic? I guess if you consider slaughterhouses and asylums and ghosts bucolic. The world is a textured place, even the parts that don't see much light. Check out some
reviews.
Maurice Manning, he of
Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions and
A Companion for Owls, keeps me coming back. I printed myself out a copy of
Eight Bucolics. Isn't he about due for another book? Cool
interview at
The Harvard Advocate from a couple years back.
- Nate
