Jordan Stempleman

Anthony McCann | Moongarden | Wave | 2006

The humor arrives perfectly synced with all the terrible upsets and effects of the mind.

Sabrina Orah Mark | The Babies | Saturnalia | 2004

Similar to stumbling into a neighbor’s backyard party well into the night, and for hours, listening to the first person who has all the stories.

Paul Hoover | Poems in Spanish | Omnidawn | 2005

This is what happens when language spends enough years with itself, and then discovers it did need someone to clearly feel it.

Amy King | I’m the Man Who Loves You | BlaxeVOX | 2007

With impossibility comes the imagination, arrangements of the landscape that will account for what can only be taken in for so long. It is here all unfolds.

Donald Revell | Invisible Green: Selected Prose | Omnidawn | 2005

No, I do not work for Omnidawn. They do this all on their own, with their own ears. And truly, I should add Aaron Shurin’s magnificent book, Involuntary Lyrics, to my list, also from Omnidawn. But to say something about Revell’s prose, read the first essay, and there will be no more difficulties in waking up each morning as a poet.

Tom Beckett | Unprotected Texts: Selected Poems 1978-2006 | Meritage | 2006

Nothing here is ignored, so all is cherished, even the zombies, friction, of course, the friction.

Graham Foust | Necessary Stranger | Flood | 2006

The controlled line, left to age those seconds it takes to jump those intolerably safe associations.

William Bronk | Life Supports | North Point | 1982

“There is no one we know could give the world away.”

Armand Schwerner | The Tablets | National Poetry Foundation | 1999

Nothing like it. Gilgamesh unpolished, untranslatable, unabashed, unclothed.

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