Carnegie Mellon University Books

Dara Wier is a genuinely distinctive and exciting American poet. In book after book, she has always written work that is fresh and often hair-raising in its innovative and playful vigor. This new collection extends that work into new and profound ground. It really is a master plan by a master poet.

Dara Wier's poetry is extremely rewarding and a joy to read. Funny, smart and beautiful, this stuff is hard to resist. I love how intricate the world seems after reading her work: nothing is simple as she peels layer after layer off the commonplace, reducing it to a crystal of emotion and sense.

The poems were powerful, moving, real.
I enjoyed every one. A must for any reader!

Scattering the Ashes is a brilliant and lyrical collection of poems that offers a clear-eyed yet compassionate insight into everyday realities: families, factories, friends. Friedman, too, widens his sharp view to include fresh analogies to Biblical characters and scenes, such as Isaac as a used-car dealer. Readers will identify with his narratives, be touched and moved by his deft language, and be entertained with his welcome infusion of humor into these poems.

Herbert Scott's new collection is truly beautiful, and for me not since his collection Groceries have I been this unwaveringly transfixed by his poems. This is a collection with a quality of looking back with wisdom but also with a voice of innocence and raw love and a gorgeous and sincere confusion with both the past and the present.

The cover painting, Sleeping Woman, is significant in its textured quality (like the poems) and its very slow and thoughtful movement (like the poems). So much can be said of one's past years later with retrospection and introspection and Scott does this better than any contemporary poet I can think of ... this is a journey, a returning into the past and the poems are sweet, musical creature resulting from this journey.

Scott not only thinks of his past, he truly seems to enter it with the reader, holding our hands throughout the journey as we feel we stand before before a screen door in summer or a frosted window in winter.

Truly beautiful and sincere, a pure pure poetry.

I had the great pleasure of meeting and interviewing Herb Scott in 2001 for a story I was writing for a local magazine about the Third Coast Anthologies and New Issues Press, of which he was founder and lifeblood. I had the renewed pleasure of hearing him read from "Sleeping Woman" in the past year, on his return to Kalamazoo in what, alas, turned out to be a farewell. Scott passed away not long after.

"Sleeping Woman," as I reread it now, still hearing his voice in my mind, lives on to pass the joy of words well framed in meaning and rhythm for poets and those who love poetry long after the poet himself is gone. Scott's work is immersed in the wonder of the everyday and the everyman, shining upon it that precise angle of light that reveals its quiet magic. He writes of bread and how it breaks in the hands, a neighbor he nods and waves to every day but will never know, a homeless man sleeping on a sidewalk in Kalamazoo, and November rain.

If I were to reach my hand
into the rich, wet leaves
and lift them to my face, I would smell
the season's blood, animal, insect,
the evidence of earthly living.
Each thing has left its mark, its scent,
all the ravelled fragments of birth
and death fallen into place.

In another poem, called "The Unforgiven," Scott writes about an observation he's made--that often when we transgress once, that is what marks our lives, although we have otherwise lived them well.

It is strange
how sometimes
no matter
if we live for years
a good and loving life
we are never forgiven
our smallest transgressions...

But we remember Herb Scott for his poetry, for his many, many good works, for his legacy of so many other fine poets that he has brought to light and to the printed page with New Issues Press.

A consummate storyteller who observes the grit and transcendence of the human experience, the healing intimacy of nature. Stafford is a wonder, astonishing in his expression, gentle in spirit. He is doing his part to heal the world through his writing.

Years ago I had the privilege of taking several college courses from Kim, including a brilliant one on Chaucer. His insights into the human condition have left an ever-burgeoning imprint on me. Seize the chance to expose yourself to his poetry.

An excellent collection. Lefer lays her settings in a wide variety of locales: Turkey, Manhattan, North Dakota, and various unidentified places in "The Heartland." Her characters are frequently perplexed. Eileen, in "Yasmin" cannot find the political refugee she is assigned to help. Midge, in "Voluntaries," had a policeman son who committed suicide. Ethan, an IRS agent in "Mr. Norton's Wart Hog," decides to take a bribe...next time. In "Trompe L'Oeil," Sheila decides to visit her mother as a hurricane approaches. All of the stories are written so well that the reader believes the author was really there. The stories are about relationships, from crazy mother and daughter to crazy man and two women, to homemaker and homeless. They are careful, thoughtful and compassionate. Lefer is not afraid to tell as well as show, and she proves that it's the right thing to do a lot of the time.

Diane Lefer must be one of the greatest uncelebrated talents writing today, and surely her latest collection of stories, "Very Much Like Desire" is to date her best published work. These stories reflect a shocking precision and unwavering originality -- of language, of feeling (always full of feeling and anti-sentimental --what a rarity!), of moral vision. This collection reads with the sureness of a master, and also the constant yearning (as reflected in all her desperate, failed, WISE characters) of a still-hopeful outsider, who hasn't given up singing to the heavens, though the heavens don't seem to notice.

This is early work by Tate. It is austere, passionate, extraordinary poetry. 20 years and more after first reading it, I will be driving or walking or dozing, and its lines will return with unparalleled power, as if I were reading it while in the car, on the street, or sleeping.

Of all the good books by James Harms AFTER WEST seems the best. I bought a copy for my son, who studied poetry with Harms at West Virginia University. The story base of the poems makes them lasting, helping to recapture the exclusivity of narrative from prose that was originally the province of poetry. And AFTER WEST seems to deepen the narrative quality of Harm's poems. The overall impact of the book is compelling and convincing. I suspect many poets read--poetry or prose or across genres--for what they can learn (and steal!) from what they read. For such readers--even if they be prose writers--AFTER WEST is a learning experience, an enjoyable, deeply resonant learning experience.

Mary Ruefle truly seems to be the lovechild of John Keats and Rainier Maria Rilke. She is traditional poetry injected with a punch of street smarts and naviete, with edgy rawness that will truly awe a reader. Among the Musk Ox People is a continuation of Ruefle's evolution. All of her collections are so significant, prophetic, grotesque, and utterly beautiful, but Musk Ox is even more so. This collection was written without apology (not that any of her other collections were) and the emotions, the open wounds, that seem so very evident in her other books, exist with even more persitence, constancy, and staunch determination. It saddens me that more people do not read poetry, especially with a living gem like Mary Ruefle roaming our poetry-starved earth desperately and lovingly trying to nourish us. Read this book and all of her other collections and I guarantee you'll have not only a craving for Keats and Rilke, but also a new outlook on positively everything in our universe, the energies around us, and the emotions inside of us.

In this astonishing debut, poet Brian Henry recounts his epic battle with the steam engine. While he certainly was the best HUMAN driving rails for the R&R, the new fangled steel drivin' machine threatened to take over the business over a century ago. Brian Henry, with an eye to the lord and a hammer in his hand, challenged the steam engine to a duel of sorts on one sunny summer afternoon. He stood up to the mechanization of human labor. Neck and mechanical neck for the entire race, Henry pulled away just at the end to beat the Frankenengine. He sighed, drank a glass of milk, laid down his hammer and died. Or so we thought. He's back in this debut collection of poems and better than ever! Lord, lord, he was a steel drivin' man! To the boat and to the rocks! Buy the book and get a whole new take on a classic american myth!

The Romanian Constantin Brancusi not only brought sculpture into modernity, but arguably was also the greatest sculptor of the 20th century. Among Brancusi's western exegetes there is a growing number of theses about the origins of, and influences into, Brancusi's creativity and style, respectively.

This work of Edith Balas, Carnegie Mellon University Professor of Art History, places (rather restitutes) the origins of Brancusi's works in the Romanian folk traditions. In doing so, the author:

1) Compares Brancusi's output to Romanian folk art (employing photos of sculpture, tapestry, etc.);
2) Quotes Brancusi;
3) Places Brancusi's works, conceptually, as a reflection of Romanian fairy tales and myths.

When Balas looks at the touted influence of African art on Brancusi she does so very carefully and manages to convincingly limit the scope of such influence--in time and artistic output. I should mention that there were indeed influences of African art in the Parisian artistic milieu in the first decades of the 20th century --several surrealists acknowledging such debt.

As a footnote, the author, coming herself from Romania, shows a great level of understanding of the Brancusian formative environment.

A few notes about the book itself. It is at its 2nd, and graphically much improved, edition. The larger size, typeface, and the general appearance of this edition do justice not only to the subject itself, but also to the labor of love Professor Balas must have put in writing it. Oh, need I say that this book has footnotes, as opposed to end-notes? No, all these don't qualify this work as coffee-table material, yet somehow this book addresses the reader's mind and senses alike. And now, as advice for bibliophiles, get your copy before late for its 1st edition has been nigh impossible to obtain for a long time. I'm assuming that lovers of (Brancusi's) art need no persuasion on the last point.

Nota Bene: For a conceptual approach towards Brancusi's place in the space-time continuum called history, Mircea Eliade in his 1967 essay 'Brancusi and Mythology' (available in 'Ordeal by Labyrinth') offers great insight too.