Best Poetry Books of 2011 - Noah Eli Gordon

Noah Eli Gordon's selections:

Threshold Songs by Peter Gizzi (Wesleyan)
I think this is Peter’s most intimate work to date.
Poems on the threshold of love, loss, and looking.

You and Three Others are Approaching a Lake by Anna Moschovakis (Coffee House Press)
Ethics in action.
Experiments in thought.

I Am a Very Productive Entrepreneur by Mathias Svalina (Mud Luscious Press)
Mathias has a masterful imagination.
Calvino meets Bill Gates.

Discipline by Dawn Lundy Martin (Nightboat)
Stunning prose.
Stellar poems.

Either Way I'm Celebrating by Sommer Browning (Birds, LLC)
Um, this is my wife’s book.
I bet she’d be mad if I didn’t mention it.

lucky coat anywhere by Michael Burkard (Nightboat)
What Do I Know

I was going to read your new book tonight going to start
on the balcony where I go to smoke standing next
to a square of light let out by the little window there
which gives enough to see if all the apartment lights are on
since I still haven’t changed the bulb above the porch a waste
I know I was going to read but the snow was too strong
it blew right into the first few pages so I closed the book
and smoked with my back to the wind which felt
deliberate and defiant at the same time I mean the act
not the weather although I know either way works really
ten years ago I wrote “gushing self-pity” next to a poem
in one of your books I’m sorry ten years ago I thought I knew
everything about what poems should do now I know I know
very little and that it’s better this way standing here in the dark

One Sleeps the Other Doesn’t by Jacqueline Waters (UDP)
What an ear.
What an eye.

Scared Text by Eric Baus (Center for Literary Publishing)
Baus is getting weirder & weirder.
Part human, half sound rain.

To Be Human Is to Be a Conversation by Andrea Rexilius (Rescue)
Genre-bending, investigative work.
.The double : elbuod ehT.

Drizzle Pocket by Tim Roberts (Blazevox)
Writing the body is already old hat.
Welcome to being the writing.

FABRIC: Preludes to the Last American Book by Richard Froude (Horse Less)
A foreigner writes America.
The future of poetry in prose.

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Noah Eli Gordon is the author of several books, including The Source (Futurepoem, 2011) and Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Perennial, 2007). Gordon is the co-publisher of Letter Machine Editions, and teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at The University of Colorado–Boulder. His recent work can be found in the following anthologies: Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, 2nd Edition (W.W. Norton, forthcoming), A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line (University of Iowa Press, 2011), Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Northwestern University Press, 2011), and Poets on Teaching (University of Iowa Press, 2010).