Bøger i Kuhl House Poets serien

Fretwork hazards a response to its dilemma by turning, skeptically and resiliently, toward the materials of lyric poetry and empathetic action, however fragmented and fragile. Glazer's poems are sculpted word by word, their forms evoking both organic process and machined exactness.

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"--