Contemporary best-sellers this week

Still holding strong at #1 on the contemporary best sellers list this week is Mary Oliver’s A Thousand Mornings. Jack Gilbert’s Collected Poems moves by leaps and bounds to #2, up from #8 last week. The second and third slots are occupied by familiar titles, Louise Glück’s Poems 1962-2012 and David Ferry’s Bewilderment. And closing out the top five is C.K. Williams’s Writers Writing Dying, which moves up from #20. Making our way to the small press list this week, Patricia Lockwood’s Balloon Pop Outlaw Black claims the top spot. From the publisher: “Even all by themselves, the titles of Patricia Lockwood's poems reveal the sort of surreal, enigmatic, rhetorically-elongated world her sensibility inhabits effortlessly: ‘When We Move Away From Here, You'll See A Clean Square of Paper Where His Picture Hung,’ ‘The Cartoon's Mother Builds a House in Hammerspace,’ ‘The Front Half and the Back Half of a Horse in Conversation,’ ‘Children With Lamps Pouring Out of Their Foreheads,’ and the inimitable ‘Killed With an Apple Corer, She Asks What Does That Make Me.’” Following Lockwood is Ben Mirov’s latest, Hider Roser. In a review at HTMLGiant, Melissa Broder writes: “There is a beautiful sadness in these poems. Mirov skillfully co-inhabits the realms of the physical and the metaphysical, the containment suit and the dark star. In a world both familiar and foreign, Mirov inquires as to the nature of the universe, as well as the absurdity of layering institutions over the void.” Finally, taking the bronze for the small press list is Emily Toder with Science. Tarpaulin Sky calls Toder’s writing, “poetry that makes you wonder why you don't get to live every day in the surreal Pythagorean-curio-shop-and-magic-garden world that Toder's poems inhabit, until you realize that you actually can live there every day, via the afore-alluded-to fibrous portal called a book, the newest and biggest and bestest of which is called SCIENCE, cloned by Coconut Books and made viral by Small Press Distribution.”