Poetry Holiday Guide - Kim Gek Lin Short & Chris Collision

Kim Gek Lin Short & Chris Collision's suggestions:

Our holiday book recommendations are for the nonpoets on your list, as poetry is for all people. Here's just a few great books to consider:

For the classicist/lumberjack: Creation Myths, Mathias Svalina (New Michigan Press, 2007)

For the mystic/romantic/guy who can't afford the therapist he needs: The Real West Marginal Way, Richard Hugo (W.W. Norton & Company, 1992).

For the historian/entomologist who habitually befriends low things: archy and mehitabel, don marquis (Doubleday, 1927)

For the statistician/pragmatist/diviner: The Weather, Lisa Robertson (new star books, 2007)

For the existentialist/Home Depot enthusiast: One Way No Exit, G.C. Waldrep (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2008)

For the spoiled mind who needs a reason to quit/keep drinking: The Dream Songs, John Berryman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982).

For the vegetarian/activist who also dabbles in voodoo: Ready-to-Eat Individual, Frank Sherlock & Brett Evans (Lavender Ink, 2008)

For the ghost/essentialist who wants to come back as a film: The Marvelous Bones of Time: Excavations and Explanations, Brenda Coultas (Coffee House Press, 2007)

For the mopey excitable youth who forgets that to go for a walk is to fall in love: Leaves of Grass: The Original 1855 Edition (Thrift Edition), Walt Whitman (Dover Publications, 2007).

For the stuffed or haunted or reminisced or sublime: The Exotic Moods of Les Baxter, Paul McCormick (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2008)

For the person you don't know but who is magically familiar: The Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson (Vintage Books, 1998)

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Kim Gek Lin Short lives in Philadelphia with her husband and daughter. Her chapbook, The Residents, is forthcoming from dancing girl press. Other new work is forthcoming in journals such as Tarpaulin Sky, Drunken Boat, and SoMa.

Chris Collision just moved to Oakland, where he continues to specialize in beer, bikes, brunettes and coffee. He collaborates with KGLS at http://rowsselavy.blogspot.com, with D. D. Tinzeroes at http://dauntlesscomics.com, among others, and makes up for that by cooperating as little as possible with everybody else all the time.