Recommended Summer Reading - Tony Mancus

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


Tony Mancus's recommendations:

The Bugging Watch by Kim Gek Lin Short (Tarpaulin Sky)
Weird and wonderful little book that unravels its story: bugs on the page, bugs in the heart of the doll that can’t be recreated and an exhibition of obsession and precisely off-kilter syntax. Good read and pocketsized (or almost), so good for the traveling. The newest round of TS books are all pretty stellar, too.

On Wonderland & Waste by Sandy Florian (Sidebrow Books)
They make very beautiful things happen at Sidebrow (also Selenography is well worth admission). The book’s got accompanying collages that work to give the prose-poems contained within it another set of mirrors to work onto and away from. The living spaces created here are as natural and as startling as the world should be.

sum of every lost ship by Allison Titus (Cleveland State)
Something in me likes the winter and seafaring. And when it’s this stupidly hot already in June, it’s nice to have a place where it feels like I could disintegrate into snow. Aside from being a seasonal transport, these poems strike notes that make my bones feel shaky (in the best way possible).

Pigafetta Is My Wife by Joe Hall (Black Ocean)
Again with the seafaring…the opening section wraps the warped head of Antonio Pigafetta up in blankets, so the fever he carries will only push the mercury further down the glass. Later there are images and lines and erasures and spaces that make a can out of your head and kick it some.

Chapbooks

Revenant by Stephanie Balzer (Kore)
A series of domestic scenes folded into meditation/mediation. The house and people within it get balanced and then cut away by a bevy of voices and contemplation. And the speaker is a reflection of all of us, in ways.

No Omen by Heather Green (Love Among the Ruins)
Very tightly wrought poems dance in sound. Again there’s something wintery here—a loss steeled by wonder and tonally (totally) grounded in its images.

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Tony Mancus lives in Rosslyn, VA with his fiance, a chinchilla, and two cats. He is co-founder of Flying Guillotine Press and he has poems coming out in Verse, Fawlt, and Artifice.