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Emanuel's version of a "new and selected poems" turns convention on its head. She ignores chronology, placing new poems beside old, mixing middle and early poems with recent work, and liberating all her poems from the restraints of their particular histories, both aesthetic and autobiographical. Whether writing in the comedic drag of the cartoon strip, or investigating the Mobius strip relationship between reader and writer, or exposing the humor and hurt that accompany visitations from Frank O'Hara and Gertrude Stein, The Nerve of It both stings and pleases with its intelligence, wit and vivacity. It breaks through, in ways that are bold, sexy, haunting and wry, the die-hard opposition of new and old, personal narrative and linguistic play, sincerity and irony, misery and hilarity. Open the book. Something new is happening here.

2000-2099

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The poems in Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes are survival songs, the tunes you whistle while walking through the Valley of Shadows, to keep your fears at bay and your spirit awake. The shadows here are many--cancer, poverty, a lost love, famine, suicide, war, an ever-encroaching existential angst. But so are the saving graces--a drag queen waitress whose "painted-on eyebrows arched like a bridge / toward starlight," "strawberries / grown fat around dimpled gold seeds," Pink Floyd's "'On the Turning Away' sent through my car / radio like the ghost voice of a beloved long dead," black phoebes rattling "winter / thistles, swollen throats percussing: / this is this is this is... " Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes reminds us that where there is shadow there must, necessarily, also be light.

2000-2099

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2000-2099

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The poems in See You Soon endeavor to test the limits of metaphor and language as their voices speak from the beauty and strangeness of daily experience, testing how we make sense of ourselves to ourselves and to one another. There is love in these poems, and there is failure and absurdity. The characters, in their various situations and guises, find themselves outside of time, space, and identity--at sunset, in an airport, outside a hookah lounge, as a birthday party clown, after a flood. Influenced by H.D., Donald Barthelme, Iris Murdoch, and Gertrude Stein, this work strives to form a resonance chamber for tone and logic that could sustain an intransitive experience of language. The message here is in the invitation of the title--See You Soon--a statement of the complexity of two people going in a mutual direction in time, and of camaraderie along the way.

2000-2099

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In When We Were Birds, Joe Wilkins wrestles his attention away from the griefs, deprivations, and high prairies of his Montana childhood and turns toward "the bean-rusted fields and gutted factories of the Midwest," toward ordinary injustice and everyday sadness, toward the imminent birth of his son and his own confusions in taking up the mantle of fatherhood, toward faith and grace, legacy and luck. A panoply of voices are at play--the escaped convict, the late-night convenience store clerk, and the drowned child all have their say--and as this motley chorus rises and crests, we begin to understand something of what binds us and makes us human: while the world invariably breaks all our hearts, Wilkins insists that is the very "place / hope lives, in the breaking." Within a notable range of form, concern, and voice, the poems here never fail to sing. Whether praiseful or interrogating, When We Were Birds is a book of flight, light, and song. "When we were birds," Wilkins begins, "we veered & wheeled, we flapped & looped-- / it's true, we flew."

2000-2099