The list of some of the poetry books that blew me away from this year is up at No Tell Motel as of this morning. Of course, as Reb knows, were we to have much more room than 2-10 books, most of us would easily have tripled the number of books we list, perhaps ending the blog as we know it. The Book of Frank (obviously) comes to mind. But I listed the Chax edition last year. I forgot to list Sonja Sekula, by Kathrin Schaeppi (hadn't come out when I first made the list), out of my publisher Black Radish Books. That's a daring book, and beautiful. I could easily pick any one title from Essay Press. Or the last three releases from Belladonna Books, each excellent. Same can be said of the books Litmus Press puts out. Or Alli Warren's chapbook from OMG (still need to get her other books). Or, though it's late 2009, Debrah Morkun's Projection Machine from BlazeVox, a stunner. Or I could have stretched it a little and gone for the Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater. To me probably one of the most important releases of the last several years, but not a single-author book (or straight up collab, etc.). Or Joan Retallack's--gorgeous.
So I figured on setting myself some narrowing rules: try to go for presses and/or authors I didn't list but could have last year (mix it up); list books that haven't been listed by other contributors (OK, Dottie Lasky's Black Life, but hell--that's a fantastic book). And try to go for the not-as-obvious, i.e., works that maybe get critical attention and are by authors that you've read before, but aren't works that basically every poet or reader has heard of. That's a hard one, since I really have no idea what you've heard of or not. I'm a hermit who lives in the woods. Anyway. Check out the No Tell Motel blog for further gift ideas. Ho. Ho. Ho.
POSTSCRIPT: read this just recently on break from work (read, blog = my break). So speaking of recommendations, here's this prose-poetic short by Amber DiPietera. Published at Tarpaulin Sky some time ago. Wow. Wow...
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