New York Times 'New & Notworthy' Includes Lauterbach, Yang, More
The New York Times spotlights a few new (and noteworthy) books of poetry appearing in bookstores this month, leading with Jeffrey Yang's new collection, Hey, Marfa (Graywolf, 2018): "a fractal portrait of Marfa, the improbable art mecca in the Texas badlands with its vibrant culture and stark scrubby landscape where 'the blood of the defeated runs / fast through the earth’s veins.' Rackstraw Downes’s paintings and drawings of the area’s electrical grid add a visual element throughout." From there:
SPELL By Ann Lauterbach. (Penguin Poets, paper, $22.) The quicksilver elusiveness of language dances through Lauterbach’s 10th collection, which darts from pithy observation to clinical definition to a chatty ongoing conversation between the poet and evening. Fittingly, the book’s title refers variously to language and magic and the passage of time, as in “we’re having a spell of dark weather.” YOU DARLING THING By Monica Ferrell. (Four Way, paper, $15.95.) This lively, subversive book is fascinated by questions of feminism and femininity — womanhood as it is lived, and as it is socially constructed. In one poem a bride who takes scissors to her husband’s shirts explains: “That kind of violence is the other side of love.”
Read more at the New York Times.