Bøker i Kuhl House Poets-serien

At once original, strange, funny, and unnerving, Shane Book's Congotronic takes the reader into unstable territory, where multiple layers of voice, diction, and music collide. Some of these poems have the sparse directness of a kind of bleak prayer; others mingle the earthbound rhythms of hip-hop with the will-to-transcendence of high Romanticism.

A collection of richly strange sequence of poems in which forces of nature, mind, spirit, and language partake of each other in vibrant and shifting ways. Rank seeks to recover sources of imaginative meaning from the unsettled remnants of lyric tradition, seeking out possibilities for belief and sustenance in the echoes of lapsed poetic speech.

Vanessa Roveto's debut collection, bodys, is a work of stunning strangeness, force, and audacity, generated by - and degenerating toward - the unanswerable question at the heart of poetic speech: What does it mean to be "a person"?

There are worlds we can imagine, but we live in this one: contingent and absurd. In her first full-length collection, Sarah V. Schweig aims to capture something essential and universal about this faulted inheritance. These poems operate on the notion that the lyric can be discovered in scattered headlines, office-wide emails, road signs-the detritus of the everyday.

With their extravagant musicality, Triplett's poems explore the thinning lines between responsibility and complicity, the tangled "supply chain" that unnervingly connects the domestic to the political, personal memory to social practice, and age-old familial discords to our new place in the anthropocentric world.

Reckons with fatherhood, the violence of nostalgia, poetry, and the commodity world of visual art as the poems here frantically cycle through responses to the speaker's son's remark on a painting by Julian Schnabel that it "looks like garbage."

Was it a crater or a sinkhole?"" asks a voice in one of the mysterious, wonderstruck poems in Christopher Bolin's Form from Form, whose cadences modulate with the energies of form-making, deformation, and elusive reformation.

As time beings, what we have is the time being, the present moment, however compromised, however shattered. Buchanan's characteristic combination of wry humour, nerve, empathy, wisdom, and outrage exposes the laughably absurd and the evisceratingly tragic all at once.

"To survive romantic love, the woman served the other woman desert dirt with shells as the truck stop receded into the distance" - so observes the mordantly detached voice of a women, an extravagantly pained, self-and-other-lacerating imaginative journey dedicated 'to relationship'.

Hajar Hussaini's poems in Disbound scrutinize the social, political, and historical traces inherited from one's language. The traces she finds--the flow of international commodities implied in a plosive consonant, an image of the world's nations convening to reject the full stop--retrieve a personal history between countries (Afghanistan and the United States) and languages (Persian and English) that has been constantly disrupted and distorted by war, governments, and media. Hussaini sees the subjectivity emerging out of these traces as mirroring the governments to whom she has been subject, blurring the line between her identity and her legal identification. The poems of Disbound seek beauty and understanding in sadness and confusion, and find the chance for love in displacement, even as the space for reconciliation in politics and thought seems to get narrower.

"Anthem Speed, Christopher Bolin's third collection with Kuhl House Poets, affirms Bolin's emergence as a singular stylist in 21st century American poetry. By turns austere, gritty, futuristic and visionary, Bolin's poems trace the romance between beauty and destruction like vapor trails, seeming to emerge from nowhere and yielding a lucid, unearthly glow, an evocation of absent presences and scattered signs: "among/ the disinformation of the distress feeds," Bolin writes, "a pilot hears his coordinates/ being called by other planes." Hypnotically lyrical, unfolding as a series of languorous, cascading fragments of song, Anthem Speed evokes the vividly mysterious remnants of a lost civilization. Its preoccupations, though, are unnervingly familiar: war, injustice, brutalization of land, air, water and species, technologies of terror and dehumanization. Simultaneously antique and space-age, inhabiting a world of elemental rites and of artificial imaginations, Anthem Speed tests the acoustics of operating rooms, battlefields, courtrooms and mountainsides, and envisions-with animal acuity-a world imperiled and empowered by its leaders and myths. Surveying a field in which the sacred has been commodified, Bolin's work moves towards re-enchantment, a poetry that preserves and aims to renew possibilities for humane action, and for humility. Anthem Speed scaffolds new ways of thinking, acting, and hungering, and invites us to imagine that "the mind was the seventh summer of an unfound planet; until the mind was the fruit dusted by antlered collisions, below.""--

"Shane Book's All Black Everything lyrics shine with work and the freedom of young people. Full of menace and humor, objects of warfare and luxury consumption are transformed with his blade of caustic irony against the world-wide nihilism of cash payments, guns, and disease. In their syncopated, slangy, and musically enjambed flow of the digital world, a poet known for singular collections has produced his most inventive and uncompromising volume yet. The political sublime of Caribbean poetics ebb and flood in this contagious new voice of borrowings, hijacking the trap house. An original collection, daring to assume the voice of the system and its death drives, having fun, mixing it up, throwing hands, too. If old pirates rob I, then Shane Book has stolen back something from them. All Black Everything is redemption song"--