Reviews

This is how I usually go to Kramerbooks. I arrive in Dupont Circle in the pre-dinner hour, emerging from the Q Street exit of the Metro and heading shortly down Connecticut Avenue and through the glass door by the shop window. Immediately you are inundated with wood shelves and stacks of all the books you’ve [...]

I had downloaded an off-line map of Vancouver for my iPad to prepare for our trip. But when I searched its catalogue for bookstores, it yielded only the BC Marijuana Party Bookstore, located in the back of the BC Marijuana Party establishment just east of Gastown (I eventually visited at the end of the trip). [...]

By this point in his career Kevin Young is an old hand at the psychic restoration of outside source material. His books, including Jelly Roll, To Repel Ghosts, and Black Maria, have each found something lyrical in the dry air of various historical and cultural archives while maintaining a crucial link to his own personal [...]

Unlike the anthologies of traditional Chinese poetry translated by Burton Watson and Stephen Owen, , compiled and translated by Keming Liu and some other writers and poets, is in bilingual format for the first time. The collection aims at “the attention of English-speaking readers a comprehensive and focused selection of contemporary Chinese poetry in translation.” [...]

Thin Kimono is a book of mistaken identities: a hallucinogenic wandering through a cocktail party the night before the invention of the internet. The party is populated with individuals you may or may not know. Your wife is a slightly altered version of herself. There are horses, but even they have become something else. Michael [...]

James Schuyler is back from the dead with the lovely “Other Flowers” a posthumous book of his unpublished, uncollected poems. Everything I have come to know and love about Schuyler’s eye and heart is here in generous supply. The poems are – like so many of the poems published in his lifetime – made from [...]

It was after an initial reading that left me intrigued yet oddly ill-at-ease, that a tidbit in Caroline Knox’s laconic introduction to her new collection of poems from Wave Books, The Nine Worthies, helped me, if not entirely to penetrate a body of work that at times seems to take as its subject matter the [...]