Recommended Summer Reading - Adam Deutsch

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

Adam Deutsch's recommendations:

Here's a list of books I'll read over and over all summer.

Collected Poems 1957 - 1982 by Wendell Berry (North Point Press, 1987)

Seven full books spanning twenty-five years. Pastoral and meditative, Berry's poems are of a higher consciousness that I believe we should all be moving toward. This is one of the books to read when you're trying to change your head so you can sit and write.

The Date Fruit Elegies by John Olivares Espinoza (Bilingual Press, 2008)

Though his explorations back into a childhood defined by location and cultural identity struggles, these poems speak to a common innocence and confront universal fears we all encounter in youth. And the second poem in the collection, "Economics at Gemco," makes me cry.

Resin by Geri Doran (Louisiana State University Press, 2005)

This book has a rare resonance that most seem to avoid, or try to hit and miss entirely. It is not clever nor easy. The poems have a place in the tradition of great poetry, and they know what that place is. I renew my membership to the Academy of American Poets, and am annually sad, purely in hopes that I am sent another book as masterful and full of presence as Resin.

Drunk By Noon by Jennifer L. Knox (Bloof Books, 2007)

I've said it before, and I'll say it over and over again: this is a wonderful book. The voices of animals, children, women and dudes all in agonizing pain under tattered bandages of our ridiculous culture. And it has replay value; a quality we need more of in our contemporary poetry collections.

The All-Purpose Magical Tent by Lytton Smith (Nightboat Books, 2009)

I just got this a few weeks ago, and it's terrifying, magnificent, gritty and mysterious. The poems are transportive. The collection moves and disorientates as if you sat in marathon of your favorite films, and when you walked outside, some how, it was still day light. I will be reading this book all summer because it earns that devotion to time. If you read it too, get in touch, and we'll talk about it.

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Adam Deutsch lives in San Diego, CA. Some poems have appeared with Juked, Caffeine Destiny, Slurve, Anti-, No Tell Motel, and Gander Press Review. He is an Editor at Cooper Dillon Books and can be found at adamdeutsch.blogspot.com.