Poetry Picks: The Best Books of 2005

Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action

(ed. Anne Waldman and Lisa Birman, Coffee House Press, 2004) Quite simply an Essential Text, full of great ideas, controversy, poetics –- you read Sonia Sanchez, Allen Ginsberg, Lorenzo Thomas, Gary Snyder all brilliantly “thinking aloud.” The truth is in the transcribing: what you have here is the pure orality laid down on the page, the Oral Tradition with all its repetitions, loops, ellipses, and praise –- the book is as much a History of Consciousness as it is The Conscience of History.

Watercolor Women/Opaque Men in Verse, by Ana Castillo

(Curbstone Press, 2005) For sheer poetic dive, grab ahold of this book-length poem, where rippling tercets spell out a wicked narrative of a wild woman who loves all and forgives none. Fierce and grand, simple and melodic, this is a book that tells all stories only once, as if life were myth, as if animals speak and sing. A grand statement of possibility in these dark times.

Wise Fish: Tales in 6/8 Time, by Adrian Castro

(Coffee House Press, 2005) From a e to ae aeeeee is how long it takes for a word under slow waves to dissolve to pure sound. This is the domain of Adrian Castro, el poeta salsero, whose slow into maturity is his second book Wise Fish. Castro lays out a groove deep as an ocean trench, and you flow with the go –- oracular orality, the rhythmic core of it, the sensuous lilt. With Adrian Castro there is always the music. Open book, hear music.

Land of My Daughters: Poems 1995-2005, by Marvin X

(Black Bird Press, 2005) Consciousness-altering, astonishing -- Marvin X is the USA’s Rumi & his nation is not “where our fathers died” but where our daughters live. X’s poems vibrate, whip, love in the most meta- and physical ways imaginable and un-. He’s got the humor of Pietri, the politics of Baraka, and the spiritual Muslim grounding that is totally new in English –- the ecstasy of Hafiz, the wisdom of Saadi. (Order directly from Black Bird Press, 11132 Nelson Bar Road, Cherokee CA 95965.)

What It Is: Poems and Opinions of Oscar Brown Jr.

(Oyster Knife Publishing, 2005) This beautiful book celebrates the life and art of the greatly missed Oscar Brown Jr., one of the Fathers of Hip-Hop. Included: the poems he wrote for Cannonball Adderley (“Work Song” and “Dat Dere”), covered by Nina Simone; his classic “Watermelon Man”; a version of “Signifyin’ Monkey”; and the two pieces that tore ‘em up on HBO Def Poetry: “This Beach” and “An Apology.” (Link above is to Amazon.com, the only online source we’ve found for What It Is.)

Eye Against Eye, by Forrest Gander

(New Directions, 2005) Forrest Gander’s deep rocking voyage from the shoals of the eyelash to the arc of the globe. Nobody starts more interior to reach out further through the guts of human suffering and passion to commune with the heavens. Gander’s attention to language seems both metaphysically dense and effortless, but he’s never anything but a friend standing next to you, telling it straight and story, seeing things the same time you do.

Dance the Guns to Silence: 100 Poems for Ken Saro-Wiwa

(Flipped Eye Publishing, UK, 2005) A new anthology edited by British slam poets Nii Ayikwei Parkes and Kadija Sesay with a foreword by Saro-Wiwa’s son, Ken Wiwa, this book is chockfull of poems that reveal the many facets of the martyr’s life of action, both political and literary. Mutabaruka, Sharan Strange, Chris Abani, Jayne Cortez, Kwame Dawes, Amiri Baraka, Kamau Braithwaite, also poems in Catalan, Scots, Creole, Castilian paying tribute to Khana, Saro-Wiwa’s Mother Tongue.

Starred Wire, by Ange Mlinko

(Coffee House Press, 2005) Winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series (disclaimer: I was the judge). It’s a heady heady brew –- O’Hara conversation, Ashbery sophistication, Koch hilarity, Schuyler shapeliness, Guest adventures, Notley grain, Mayer utopia, Padgett whimsy, Oulipo oofs –- I’d go on, on & on till the break of dawn, say, but part of the Mlinko wonder is that she doesn’t –- there’s no retelling. She revs, she’s gone, the world map is redrawn, that’s about the size of it for each poem.

America: A Prophecy, The Sparrow Reader

(Soft Skull Press, 2005) You will laugh until the soup burbles, and you may not have had any soup. Sparrow is a saint, he is St. Comedy Satire Hilarity Haha, and he is poet first-rate and US citizen first class even if he writes in French, or tries to, but not in this book. Here are some Op Ed pieces from the NY Times, some translations from the New Yorker, a description of his joyous jousts with that magazine (yes, they published him), proverbs, sex with Cher, Sparrow’s Bad Poetry Seminar....

Poems for Teeth, by Richard Loranger

(We Press, 2005) Richard Loranger, Poet of Ecstasy in Everyday Drag! Salute You, We Do! For your every breath is a foray into the Unknown! And as the extraordinary poems in this one-of-a-kind venture by a one-of-a-kind poet unwind, the Reader’s Mind gets a much-needed deep flossing, unhidden and totally useful. Richard Loranger is another word for Blessing, and this book is more evidence of that fact.