Recommended Summer Reading - Marcela Sulak

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


Marcela Sulak's recommendations:

Inseminating the Elephant by Lucia Perillo (Copper Canyon, 2009)
Knock out poems that draw on Perillo’s training as a biologist. Perilla does for animal anatomy what Roebling did for steel cables.

Noose and Hook by Lynn Emanuel (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009)
I don’t know how to describe her book, so here’s a couple of lines from “Dream in Which I Meet Myself,” : Whitman, I fell in love with capitalism / because of your commas // in lines that cannot decide / if they are crowbars for rending and tearing or sutures for holding the wound together.

Tsim Tsum by Sabrina Orah Mark (Saturnalia, 2009)
Prose poems so tender and startling. Mark Doty likens them to “episodes from a lost, slightly sinister children’s book on the nature of love and time.” And I agree. They also remind me of Randall Jarrell & Edward Gorey.

The Garden Room by Joy Katz (Tupelo Press 2006)
After this little chapbook, your home will never feel familiar again. And that’s a good thing, if you like cosmic.

These Mountains: Selected Poems by Rivka Miriam, translated from the Hebrew by Linda Stern Zisquit (Toby Press, 2009)
Quiet poems steeped in Bible, history, geography, hovering between the physical female body and her spirit, these poems subtly shift the ground beneath your feet until you are either gasping in terror or walking on air. Depending.

Friendly Fire by Katrina Roberts (Lost Horse Press 2008). I love how this book emergizes the sonnet form by playing with rhyme.

New-to-me: The Bat Poet & The Animal Family by Randall Jarell (reissued by Harper Collins in 1997 & 1996)
Beautiful accounts of oddballs and the hard happiness they create through art and community.

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Marcela Sulak is the author of Immigrant (Black Lawrence Press, 2010) and Of All The Things That Don’t Exist, I Love You Best (Finishing Line Press, 2008). She’s translated poetry collections from Congo-Zaire and Hapsburg Bohemia, and directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Creative Writing Program at Bar-Ilan University.