Great Regulars: [The Book of Things

(Lannan Translations Selections) by Ales Steger] is structured in seven chapters of seven poems each, following the strange preface "A," which [Brian] Henry calls a "proem" though it is written in verse. The other forty-nine poems are titled after things with no obvious connection to each other, from the first poem "Egg" to the last poem "Candle," with stops as varied as "Strobe Light" and "Cocker Spaniel." The first set of seven is completed with "Knots," "Stone," "Grater," "Cat," "Sausage," and "Urinal," the last of which completes its well-developed imagery of the urinal as the mouth of a fish embedded in a restroom wall with a haunting testicular threat:

from Powells: Review-A-Day: The Book of Things

~~~~~~~~~~~

[Michele] Glazer's "made up world" is a landscape of detritus, of things so common and overlooked--a dead bird, soil, worms, fungus, a path "made of things cast off"--that their foregrounding lends them an almost surreal, conceptual presence. Proceeding from Wallace Stevens's observation that the imagination "makes use of the familiar to produce the unfamiliar," Glazer presents the reader with mundane objects transformed by the subjective consciousness in ways that both de-familiarize them and endow them with additional, unforeseen dimensions.

from Powells: Review-A-Day: Making It Up

~~~~~~~~~~~

The language leaves the reader with little choice in the matter--[Tomaz] Salamun's work is jammed with lines and phrases that stick in the mind, resurfacing in moments of quiet reflection, or on the train when the mind loosens in the press of the everyday. And that press is what Salamun's work, especially in this book, evokes.

At the same time he is incredibly interior. That conflation of the internal and external is strange and at times grotesque.

from Powells: Review-A-Day: Objectively Dangerous

~~~~~~~~~~~