Craig Dworkin
November 19, 2007 by SteveCaroline Bergvall | FIG | Salt | 2005
I keep coming back to the Dante Variations, a series of displacements of translations, or translations of displacements, all via the narrow path of the darkly worded OuLiPo. The Variations look at first like a work you don’t really need to read all the way through—though they turn out to be not only compulsively readable but entirely unexcerptable.
Mónica de la Torre | Sound Systems | Switchback | 2007
Eclectic sampler of sounds, both found and scored, into the array of systems that make language audible—systems in which genres, voices and contexts are organized to construct identifiable selves. With an understated mastery of forms and a wicked intelligence, de la Torre is always one step ahead of the reader, but the poems always have the good manners not to point that out.
Johanna Drucker | From Now | Cuneiform | 2005
The political made personal, as the visual hailing of news headlines and commercial advertising attracts the attention of the lived present—warping the subjectivities that recognize and resist their interpellation. Expertly typeset, Drucker’s design makes the real agenda of the book clear. File under poetry, memoir, cultural studies, feminist theory, artists books, and current events (where current is a measure of electricity).
Kenneth Goldsmith | Traffic | Make Now | 2007
The most unoriginal book I’ve read in years. Goldsmith provides a 21st-Century sequel to Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend, with all the audacity, formal bravura, tedium, and blistering critique of the original.
Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-Henry | Apostrophe | ECW | 2006
The best “digital poetry”yet written, even in its book format: a project that spiders its way to the heart of the web and captures the logic of new media. Chilling and ridiculous, this is the poetic version of the Bush administration’s culture of unconstitutional surveillance.
Emily McVarish | Flicker | Granary | 2005
In terms of engagement with a text’s modes of production, this is the smartest artists book I’ve ever seen; McVarish brings the logic of the digital to the craft of letterpress with a brilliant (literal) twist. A work of absolute genius.
Helen Mirra | Cloud, the, 3 | Christoph Keller | 2007
Philosophical lyricism tracing the points at which the most specific and minute particulars of a book open onto the most metaphysical abstractions. Be sure to consult the index.
Thomas Pynchon | Against the Day | Penguin | 2006
Anarchists, Mormons, and the wild west of conspiracy. I’ve only read a few hundred pages, but the paragraph on Queen Victoria’s philatelic time-warp is worth the whole thing.
Jordan Scott | blert | Coach House | 2007, forthcoming
What do marine mammals, neurotoxins, glacial geology, human skeletal anatomy and small rocks have in common?
Tyrone Williams | on spec | Omnidawn | 2008, forthcoming
A map of the social space of language described by the chance intersection of disparate planes of idiom and vernacular. Williams pursues an eshuneutics (interpretation from the perspective of the Yoruba trickster), or what Jacques Derrida would identify as the “+ex effect.”
John Barton Wolgamot | In Sara, Mencken, Christ And Beethoven There Were Men and Women | privately printed, but available as liner notes to the eponymous Lovely Music CD LCD-4921 (2003) | 1944
I’d always assumed that Keith Waldrop had fabricated Wolgamot as a kind of avant-garde prank, but research in the special collections at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore confirms that Wolgamot was the real deal: an outsider genius.
