Short Attention Span 2008

Steve Evans’s annual Attention Span roundups bring a welcome Oscar-style buzz to the cultural sub-station that is small press experimental poetry. While Price Waterhouse tabulates results for 2008, I’ll make like Philip Metres and pull back the curtain on mine. (Solicited mid-July, so much worthy new stuff missed.)

K. Silem Mohammad & Anne Boyer, eds. | Abraham Lincoln issues 1, 2 & 3 | 2007-2008
Nascent American sensibility change in easy-to-staple rainbow cat trading card format.

Hannah Weiner | Hannah Weiner’s Open House | Patrick F. Durgin, ed. | Kenning | 2006
Each room has many mansions. More doors, please, Patrick, soon.

Gary Sullivan | PPL in a Depot | Roof | 2008
Brecht shutting cellphone to mustachio Mozart with Caucasian circle chalk: “Between the dark and the thyme soufflé … mmmm …”

Philip Whalen | The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen | Michael Rothenberg, ed. | Wesleyan | 2007
New eyes for old wineskin yclept Beat.

Sharon Mesmer | Annoying Diabetic Bitch | Combo | 2008
Dear Poetry: Please can you be this sometimes always?

Kevin Killian | Selected Amazon Reviews | Brent Cunningham, ed. | Hooke | 2006
The nation speaks through its stars—Reviewer #80 is America’s Most Wanted detourniste.

Maryrose Larkin | The Book of Ocean | i.e. | 2007
Newton’s apple fallen and cleaned to Eve’s, sent into re-orbit: poems for a world like that.

Benjamin Friedlander | The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes | subpress | 2007
Transatlantic two-step for treated Bösendorfer. The feet slip at ends of lines, like when you trip in dreams. Your catching yourself’s the poem.

Alicia Cohen | Debt and Obligations | O Books | forthcoming, 2009
To make Temecula and connected earth systems versus all reason sweet and green: “Actual people breathe the ghost.”

K. Silem Mohammad | Breathalyzer | Edge | 2008
That thing Greil Marcus said about buying an album of Dylan breathing hard? That. “There’s no way we’re not going to start a ruckus in a country town.”

Jules Boykoff & Kaia Sand | Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Space | Palm | 2008
Field manual for the practice of not sitting on hands, pitched against “the almost imperceptible social octave known as normality.”