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Reviews:

Hank Lazer reviews Glenn Mott's Analects on a Chinese Screen in Golden Handcuffs Review.

Jeremy Hawkins reviews Glenn Mott's Analects on a Chinese Screen in Zoland Poetry.

Ron Silliman's online blog has a couple of different notices of recent Chax Press books. Visit Silliman's Blog, and scroll through his May 14, 2003 entries. He writes specifically about one poem in our recent chapbook by Charles Bernstein. Silliman begins his note by calling Let's Just Say "an intensely beautiful chapbook by Charles Bernstein just out from Chax Press."

Silliman's Blog, in its April archive, also has two note on our recent chapbook by Robert Creeley, entitled Yesterdays. We hope you visit the site to read Silliman's graceful notes in their entirety. But here is a sample.

Between his New Direction volumes, Robert Creeley has developed a pattern of issuing one or more small chapbooks in the interim – they engage his long-standing commitment to the small press scene and are often a relief against the bland uniform packaging that is the ND trademark. None of these chapbooks has been simpler, nor more elegant or delightful than Yesterdays, Creeley’s latest from Chax Press. Charles Alexander, who learned the book arts directly from Walter Hamady, the Yoda of fine press printing, is himself a master craftsman with a rare sense of just when to assert himself in the process. With Yesterdays, Alexander has taken the lowest key approach, letting Creeley’s text do all the heavy lifting.

As well it does. These pieces are among the very best of Creeley’s recent work, which means that as a reader I’m virtually hopping up & down with excitement at each new poem.

John Olson reviews David Bromige's As in T As in Tether in the Spring 2003 issue of Rain Taxi. He writes that "David Bromige's As in T as in Tether is about language as structure. All the poems have a visual impact; they are uniformly justified to the center so that they resemble columns, similar to George Herbert's "The Altar," and nearly all of MClure's poetry. Bromige uses this justification to showcase the structural features of language: each individual line is sharply disjunctive, which gives the poems an acute sense of being built, rather than written. The poems feel as though the lines had been attacked, one on top of the other, to make a column of words, sounds, and letters." He concludes his review by saying that "Bromige has always been an especially witty and playful poet; his imaginative verse has always had the bounce and impulse of linguistic polkas. Here, the tension between free-for-all wordplay and structural pattern finds a luscious counterpoint intertwined in a closely knit texture — or tether — of semantic polyphony."
For the full review, please see the issue of Rain Taxi. If your local boookstore does not carry Rain Taxi, you may order a copy, or subscribe, by visiting the Rain Taxi web site.

Ray Gonzalez reviews Nathaniel Tarn's The Architextures in The Bloomsbury Review, and writes that, "I don't know where [Nathaniel Tarn] has been, but this amazing sequence of prose poems shows he has returned in spectacular style."

In Christianity and Literature, Anne Ramirez reviews two Chax Press books by Diane Glancy, The Closets of Heaven and Adoration. Of the first she writes of its "sheer originality," and calls it a "four-part symphony." She says, "It is a testimony to Glancy's art that The Closets of Heaven would require many rereadings if one would fathom its depths and unravel its many-colored threads."