Best Poetry Books of 2011 - Cindy St. John

Cindy St. John's selections:

Culture of One by Alice Notley (Penguin)
for your future self, “grown very tall and large, and may not fit into the métro.”

Headlamp limited edition broadsides: Hoa Nguyen/Ronaldo Wilson or Mary Ruefle/Abi Daniel
for you and “your your your” and yours.

Matchbook Volume 3
for the gardener who "hides the picture/ of the naked/ blonde with saucer/ nipple tits hanging."

Becoming Weather by Chris Martin (Coffee House Press)
for those who “still want to be as real as a hamburger.”

July Oration by Dale Smith (Fact Simile)
for “Abraham Lincoln in a stovepipe hat” and anyone who is “hungry.”

Bumpers by Kyle Schlesinger (Cuneiform Press)
for someone who has "killed an afternoon in Mamaroneck just to watch it die."

Oz by Nancy Eimers (Carnegie Mellon University Press)
for those who “feel other sentences yielding to seismic vibrations that could mean the underground presence of nothing or something.”

Stanzas in Meditation by Gertrude Stein, edited by Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina
for a friend who "likes it that there is no chance to misunderstand pansies." (Yale University Press)

I Am a Very Productive Entrepreneur by Mathias Svalina (Mud Luscious Press)
"for the most delicate of osteoporotic pianists.”

Ordinary Sun by Matthew Henriksen (Black Ocean)
for those who "embrace the solid and particular with a mind of glass and broken bricks."

Sand Theory by Bill Olsen (Northwestern University Press)
for “the neighbor across the street who picks up every twig on her sidewalk / because secretly she wishes to put a tree back together."

The Market is a Parasite That Looks Like a Nest by Susan Briante (Dancing Girl Press)
for you, if you live on “a street named for revolution.”

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Cindy St. John is the author of three chapbooks: Be the Heat (forthcoming from Slash Pine Press), City Poems (Effing Press) and People Who Are in Love Will Read This Book Differently (Dancing Girl Press). She lives in Austin, TX, where she prints Headlamp, letterpress postcards of poetry and art.