Recommended Summer Reading - Steven Karl

During May and June, No Tells is featuring "Recommended Summer Reading" selections by No Tell contributors.

Steven Karl's recommendations:

The Green Lake Is Awake by Joseph Ceravolo (Coffee House Press)

Ceravolo’s selected poems are a collection of fragmented, sometimes absurd but always immediate lyric. Who wouldn’t want to read poems like “Ho Ho Ho Caribou,” and “Spring in This World of Poor Mutts?”

Zoland Poetry, An Annual of Poems, Translations & Interviews No. 3 edited by Roland Pease (Zoland Books/ Steerforth Press)

Summer is perfect weather for anthology reading. This one features original poems by a variety on “known” and “up and coming” poets such as Albert Goldbarth, Ron Padgett, Major Jackson, Noah Eli Gordon and Lynn Xu.

Delivered by Sarah Gambito (Persea Books)

Gambito’s second book is an exploration of identity, politics, and prejudice (both systemic and private). This book finds Gambito in top form with a fiery tongue and a heart big enough to heal or frighten each one of us.

Tuned Droves by Eric Baus (Octopus Books)

This book arranges and deranges senses and intellect always shifting just left of periphery. What is stilled is static but what is static may not be stilled. Eric Baus does that to you. Makes you double-think so that everything is at once familiar and foreign.

Hurry Home Honey by Sawako Nakayasu (Burning Deck)

Ok, I’m still waiting for this one to arrive, but this is the book I’m most excited to read for summer. Here’s a blurb about the book, “These love poems are unusual for their sense of moving between cultures, their awareness of physical space as articulated by the intersection of human beings, the land, and architectural structures. Love itself is now game, sport, speed-time, dance, performance, now contract, conflict, failure, but always a shifting structure of relation.”

* * *

Steven Karl is the author of the forthcoming chapbook, State(s) of Flux (Peptic Robot Press), which is a collaboration with the artist, Joseph Lappie. His poems are forthcoming from Coconut, Vanitas, and Taiga.