Recommended Summer Reading - Gary L. McDowell

During the month of June, No Tells is featuring "Recommended Summer Reading" selections by No Tell contributors.


Gary L. McDowell's recommendations:

Though I’ll be spending the majority of my summer reading for my Ph.D qualifying exams, there are a few new-ish poetry books that I’ll definitely be reading voraciously during the warm months nonetheless. There are:

Ghost Lights by Keith Montesano (Dream Horse Press, 2010)
The poems collected here explore the psychological, spiritual, and physiological repercussions and limits of elegiac speech, poesy, rhetoric, and shape. The poet, while in control of his world and the life he spins from the crumbs of love and death, never--and yet always--succumbs to the beauty of language and image above all else.

Then, Something by Patricia Fargnoli (Tupelo Press, 2009)
Any book that’s titled after my favorite Frost poem will definitely make its mark on me! A great, beautiful, spasmingly gorgeous book.

Fancy Beasts by Alex Lemon (Milkweed Editions, 2010)
An incredibly vibrant follow-up to Lemon’s Hallelujah Blackout, Fancy Beasts engages with a more political bend in the cosmos, though the energy, the syntactic play, the humor, the virtuoso handling of idea vs image still prevails and wallops with the best of his work.

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Gary L. McDowell’s first book, American Amen, won the 2009 Orphic Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from Dream Horse Press. He is also the author of two chapbooks, including They Speak of Fruit (Cooper Dillon, 2009), and co-editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice (Rose Metal Press, 2010). His new poems are forthcoming in journals such as The Bellingham Review, H_NGM_N, Indiana Review, The Laurel Review, Parthenon West Review, and Quarterly West.