JOIN US for another round of poetry recommendations, this time in celebration of the rich and diverse cultures, traditions, and contributions of Native people. Follow these poets over water, land, and ice, through dreams and histories, as they examine language, loss, violence, revolution, resilience, and home.

 

Camille Dungy Recommends:

 

 

An American Sunrise by Joy Harjo

This heart opening collection from the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States is not to be missed. Harjo knows how to share the songs that tie the present to the past and make possible a future in which healing and truth can live side by side. In An American Sunrise Harjo retraces her own family’s Trail of Tears (she reminds us there are many Trails of Tears, that such violent relocations continue today), traveling from Oklahoma back to her ancestral home in Georgia. She describes “how beautiful it was// the waters… these healing plants, these stones.” She remembers what happened on that land, and how, and by whom. Filled with archival texts and collected memories, these poems are woven through with electric currency and the life force that connects across time and space and bodies. (W. W. Norton)

 

 

Horsefly Dress by Heather Cahoon

We convey meaning through language. We describe landscapes, histories, thoughts, ethics, memories, and science via language. Language is the way we express who we are and how we understand the world. To lose a language is to lose a way of living, a way of existing and feeling and walking through landscapes and histories. While to gain a language is to expand our connection to dreams and animals, to trees and medicines, to rivers and ancestors, to logic and truth. To gain a language is to gain ways of moving through the world. This is part of why I find Horsefly Dress, in which Cahoon sometimes mixes traditional Séliš (Salish) and Qlispé words and stories into contemporary contexts, so thrillingly necessary, revolutionary, and right. (University of Arizona Press)

 

 

What the Chickadee Knows by Margaret Noodin

“Whether we hear giji-giji-shii-shii or chick-a-dee-dee-dee depends on how we have been taught to listen.” These are the first words in Noodin’s preface to a collection of poetry “conceived first in Anishinaabemowin and then in English.” These poems, Noodin writes, “are an attempt to hear and describe the world according to an Anishinaabe paradigm.” Including a pronunciation guide and English translations, What the Chickadee Knows allows readers another way to read and see and hear landscapes and lives and waters and skies around the confluence of the Minisota and Michizibi Rivers. (Wayne State University Press)

 

 

when it rains/ mat hekid o ju edited by Ofelia Zepeda

First published in 1982 and reissued in 2019, this book is one of the earliest published collections of literature written by and in the language of the Tohono O’odham Nation and the Gila River Indian (Pima) Community. Though when it rains is presented in a bilingual format, the writing was originally composed in Tohono O’odham and Pima. Zepeda believes this offered the nearly twenty mixed generation poets presented in the collection a crucial opportunity to write differently than they might in English. “I believe it would not have been as meaningful. Since we have no word for ‘poetry’ in the language, we call poems ha-cegĭtodag, literally thoughts.” The landscape of the Southwest is a life-shaping force of the thoughts on these pages. Writers think about rain, menacing horned toads, sun, prickly pear, cholla, mesquite beans, what it means to call a desert home. One contributor, Helen J. Ramon, writes “The desert is work, but for our good/The desert is for our good.” (University of Arizona Press)

 

 

Dark Traffic by Joan Naviyuk Kane

Just as the massive, Cold War-era long-distance communication dishes known by the name White Alice were once scattered across Alaska’s landscape, White Alice poems recur throughout Dark Traffic. They convey wreck and ruin, sending sonic clusters of rage and worry bouncing from page to page. Look around, as the poems in this book do, and see ice melting, see landing sites where you thought there was nowhere to land, see snow geese and coal dust and crowberry-stained ground. See a Native Alaskan woman seeking help from one of the only female psychiatrists of color in the state. See a single mother teaching her son to swim. This book’s scattered, honest communications are lyric and concrete and rooted in place, in the body, in violence, in reckoning, and in truth. (University of Pittsburgh Pitt Poetry Series)

 

 

Aurum by Santee Frazier

The word “Aurum” means “Gold.” Frazier’s book is less about the fortunes some reap from its sale, and less about the luster and shine of the metal, than it is about what is left behind after its mining. Consider the second to last section of a long poem called “Half-Life,” which describes an image titled “49ers Chain Indians to Trough.” The energy in Aurum is like a woodstove Frazier describes elsewhere in “Half-Life”: “Its bulbous hull/ a womb/ of popping embers.” As these poems insist, “This is not fate.” The “dislodged earth” and hunger here, the violence and the anger, the “gritty air” and “fungal,” “mangled” disarray, the “dust and exhaust” and dead animals are all by design. What we’re left with after picking up Aurum are the spoils of a culture of rapacious, careless “thirst.” (University of Arizona Press)

 

 

Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers by Jake Skeets

Skeets’s lyrics lay bare the splendor and terror of living and loving in the world he reveals. This terror is all the more present for a man-loving man, and even more specifically for a Diné man trying to survive in Gallup (or what the book calls Drunktown). There is a great deal of brutal (and often seemingly routine) violence in this book, but there is also a great deal of tenderness. These poems are grounded in place, rising up out of the Earth with intention. Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers took my breath away over and over again. (Milkweed Editions)

 

 

Our Bearings by Molly McGlennen

I’m drawn to McGlennen’s book for the ways the poems use setting to further develop their subjects. McGlennen was born and raised in Minneapolis, and this is the place generations of her family have called home since a time long before the place was called Minneapolis. “More than half of Indigenous peoples within the United States live in cities today,” McGlennen writes. And she asks, “What would a poetic mapping of Indigenous urban space look, sound, and feel like?” Our Bearings is part of her answer. (University of Arizona Press)

 

 

Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First People’s Poetry edited by Joy Harjo

Those interested in Harjo’s writing should be sure not to miss the recent anthology collected as part of her signature laureate project. Harjo says, “Poetry doesn’t just emerge, it emerges from the soul of a community.” In Living Nations, Living Words, you’ll find poems by 50-some Indigenous American and Pacific Islander writers, including Ray Young Bear, Imaikalani Kalahele, Elise Paschen, Roberta Hill, Duane Niatum, Cedar Sigo, Henry Real Bird, Natalie Diaz, Mahealani Perez-Wendt, and Layli Long Soldier. The anthology, as well as the ground-breaking online project from which the anthology grew, reinforces the truth that “heritage is a living thing, and that there can be no heritage without land and the relationships that outline our kinship.” (W.W. Norton)

 

Recommendations from Poet Friends:

 

 

Felicia Zamora recommends Little Big Bully by Heid Erdrich

 

The voices in Heid Edrich’s Little Big Bully (winner of the 2019 National Poetry Series) meticulously interrogate the origins of violence, the inceptions of bullies—from the learned cruelty of children (“little bullies   scripted so early/ they make    one big bully decree”), to the genocide of colonization, to a society hushed around rape and sexual assault, to the murders of Native women, to the interior impacts of such abuse and erasure, to language, to how violence in the mundane is still violence. The Indigenous body, the woman body, the missing body, are all landscape in these powerful, provocative, and limit-breaking poems. In a world where femicide runs rampant, Erdrich’s poems bellow—Don’t look away. Enough. Enough. These poetic worlds carve new futures where healing, love, family, and self-sovereignty exist. The grief in these poems is a collective grief—“when every child born is ours    every child mine.” Let us bellow out together—Enough. (Penguin Books)

 

 

John Sibley Williams recommends How to Dress a Fish by Abigail Chabitnoy 

Rooted in both place and placelessness, in cultures thriving yet irrevocably changed by outside influences, in “legacy as a blank space. A space that unlike a slate cannot be written,” the poems in How to Dress a Fish are whittled from dynamic contrasts that weave an easily permeable net through which the landscape and the human pass into and through each other. These poems refuse erasure. They take responsibility for themselves and remind us of our own responsibilities. Chabitnoy’s vision is one of faith to her family’s cultural narrative, bearing the weight of centuries, that also fixates on the smallest, deeply human details. There’s such sharpness to her metaphors, such richness to the world she builds for us. These poems are both myth-creating and myth-dismantling, simultaneously defining the edges and pushing against the edges of the American experience. Through essential, captivating, beautifully empathetic language, Chabitnoy exposes her own uncertainties about how to best suffer her family’s traumas in a way that will open and heal our ongoing national wounds. After several readings of this gorgeous book, I believe, at its core, How to Dress a Fish works to paint a multifaceted portrait of betweenness. As a child of mixed heritage, Chabitnoy seems to question her prescribed place in both familial communities. Yet she chooses to celebrate them. These poems choose to celebrate everything they touch. Even their own ghosts. Even that greater truth that always remains just slightly out of reach, that she refuses to stop reaching toward. (Wesleyan University Press)

 

 

Sandra Lim recommends Flood Song by Sherwin Bitsui

The breathtaking sequence that is Sherwin Bitsui’s Flood Song combines contemporary life and Native traditions. But that is an arid description for what feels like a mesmerizing conjuring; the assemblages of sound and movement and thinking reveal a perceptiveness that can move quickly from the real to the imagined and back again without breaking tone. Read this book aloud to feel the expansiveness and revealing asperities of a compassionate imagination. (Copper Canyon Press)

 

 

Chris La Tray recommends His Feathers Were Chains by Denise Lajimodiere

Denise Lajimodiere is Turtle Mountain Chippewa, and her latest book of poetry is a document of what that means. Here we find voyageurs and lard sandwiches, grandmothers and boarding schools. We also find love and family and hard winters. We find life in the cradle of where an entire Indigenous culture was born, and it is beautiful. (North Dakota State University Press)

 

 

Keetje Kuipers recommends Bright Raft in the Afterweather by Jennifer Foerster

What are our ways of making meaning in a poem? Image, music, voice, story. But what rhetorical devices stand up to the interrogation of apocalypse—both the embodied memory of a continent once untouched by white men and now a planet where the human hand has rummaged through and soiled every corner? This argumentation cannot happen in a straight line, or a straight lyric. It requires interruption, and a kind of synesthetic weaving where the sense memory of the past and the future trigger each other. Such are the poems in Jennifer Elise Foerster’s second book, Bright Raft in the Afterweather, which employs every kind of poetic device, each in competition with another, until we understand how debilitating it can be to write such an end: “rejected materials / and you are meant to respond to the stain.” As a member of the Mvskoke (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, Foerster is writing towards landscapes informed by trauma, and she maps that wound from ocean to plains, even to the Cannonball River at Standing Rock. There is tremendous beauty in these poems—the women who walk through them have the potency of myth and the familiarity of flesh and blood—but it is a tenuous beauty: remembered, retrieved, and once again revoked: “You will look for patterns / and see none. / You will look for openings— / they will close to you. / The light in each grass fast fading— / we lie down in this dark.” (University of Arizona Press)

 

 

Abigail Chabitnoy recommends Look at This Blue by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

“The path we have taken has rotted / Ignite, stand upright, conduct yourself like lightning,” Allison Adelle Hedge Coke quotes Inuit poet Tanya Tagaq at the start of her electric new book. This epigraph sums up the excitement and urgency of Look at This Blue. What Hedge Coke provides readers in the pages that follow is the lightning rod. Her long poem slips in and out of images of violence against the land, specifically California, the flora and fauna and many immigrants and indigenous peoples of that land, the poor and cast out and overlooked and neglected and abused of that land, ever aware of the undercurrents that connect each transgression. While I’ve grown suspicious that one can give voice to the voiceless without doing further violence, these lines are not acts of ventriloquism, nor even quiet moments of witnessing. These are the aftershocks of the violences we as a nation would not see, haunting the periphery until there is nowhere we can look without being made at last to see. But in this litany of those who have been lost and those who are at risk, so too there is an act of preservation, a summons, and offering. If not promise, then a charge, a spark, to move us along. This book is like nothing I’ve seen from Hedge Coke before. It was just what I needed to read right now. (Forthcoming from Coffee House Press)

 

 

John Sibley Williams recommends Brother Bullet by Casandra López

In a series of beautifully rendered gut-punch poems as personal as they are (unfortunately) universal, Brother Bullet is a careful and intimate study of grief in relationship to gun violence. López observes how violence (being a victim of it, witnessing it, and surviving it) becomes part of our intersecting identities. Drawing on her own migratory experiences, she transports us across an American Southwest filled with stark imagery as emotionally raw as it is gentle, as wounded as it is revelatory. And these poems really are revelations! López is trying to do in her work what many people say is impossible: making sense of something senseless, learning how to cherish and even celebrate what remains after violence has taken so much from us—a lesson America keeps struggling to address over and over again. Though the essential relationship between individual and communal responsibility sparks off the page in fresh, moving ways, Brother Bullet never strays far from its heartbreakingly personal core. I could feel, quite deeply, how the trajectory of the bullet that killed López’s brother moves through each poem. “I need these reminders of / how we survive and still grow / so fiercely against the edges of this earth.” We are lucky to have her reminders. We are lucky she has invited us in to see her love, her family, her trauma, her pain, her Brother, and her grief process. Through this collection, she brings us that much closer to a necessary reckoning, and catharsis. (University of Arizona Press)

 

Want more poetry recommendations from Orion poetry editor Camille Dungy? Click here. 

 

 

ORION‘s poetry editor Camille Dungy and friends are back with another suite of poetry recommendations we’re excited to share for October, National Disability Employment Awareness Month.

In this gathering of books you will find important work from an expansive group of poets. Some are well-known voices in disability poetics, while others don’t consider their diagnosed conditions to be disabling on most or perhaps any days. Some live with invisible or hidden disabilities—autoimmune conditions, chronic depression, epilepsy—while others live with reproductive health issues, or varying degrees of neurodivergence. You will also find poets who are family members or caretakers of members of the disability community, poets who don’t use the word “disabled” to describe themselves, and poets who claim crip labels.

The following recommendations are less interested in these writers’ diagnoses and far more interested in the ways the poets’ writing can help us all connect more fully and completely with the planet on which we all live.

 

Camille Dungy Recommends:

 

 

Gut Botany by Petra Kuppers

In work by Petra Kuppers there are always revelations and revolutions, and this is certainly true of the poems included in Gut Botany. Kuppers is interested in the ways the unstable language of “poetry provides a site to explore crip experience” (see Kuppers’s 2007 article “Performing determinism: Disability culture poetry), and also how the unstable language of poetry reveals the human role in ecological violence as well as potential environmental renewal. As has been the case in so much of Kuppers’s work, the poems in Gut Botany beg questions about culturally enforced binaries of all kinds. Kuppers moves beyond the limits of what separates the human body from the fish’s or the lake’s or the dinosaur’s, the female body from the male, the “disabled” body from the “able” body, a settler’s body from an Indigenous one, and more and more. Kuppers’s writing is additive, even multiplicative, rather than subtractive or divisive. The book explores myriad forms violence, but also makes room for bodies touching other bodies in wonder and in love. (Wayne State University Press)

 

 

Another Last Day by Alex Lemmon

I wonder how many poetry book reviews use the words “liminal space” to describe the zone of wonder and horror good books can exist within. This book exists in such a liminal space. A space between the body and the mind, not quite fully in either, between sickness and health, care and destruction. The word “liminal” points to a threshold, where a body may as likely enter as exit. Each section’s set of couplets looks with striking precision on the living world that, day by day, we love and lose. This long, linked series is divided into fifty-four sections. The Roman numerals only go up to LIII, but look closely. Like Adrienne Rich, whose Collected Poems should also be of interest to readers drawn to the poets included in these reviews, Lemmon includes a floater. Stability and instability. Hope and dread. The world spins on its axis and, for a time at least, we’ll go along for the ride. (Milkweed Editions)

 

 

In the Field Between Us by Molly McCully Brown + Susannah Nevison

 

These poems! These poems! These letters between friends, lifelines and love notes, these acts of witness and rage. Every line in these pages guts me and sews me together again. “When I open / my hands, I’m never surprised by the birds they turn into” writes Nevison in one of the collection’s “Dear M—” poems. And Brown writes back, “Dear S— / The birds our hands become / are the ones with holes cut / in their cores so you can see / right through them to the world / they’re leaving toward…” Page after page, this book sees the body in the world and the world in the body, and both are flawed and routed with pain, and also lyric and lovely and, thank the Maker, most days still fully alive. (Persea Books)

 

 

Anodyne by Khadijah Queen

The poems in Anodyne are carved out of the landscapes of this world, like rock art that seems to scream SOMEONE WAS HERE!! These poems refuse to be “invisible, unspoken.” Refuse to be “covered up / by made-up valor or resilience.” They insist on taking up space in the landscape, as painful as that might be. They remind us that our culture’s judgments suggest that “some / people are not worth saving,” and they resist such judgments and the actions such judgments unleash. The poems remind me that “Hordes of animals without teeth crash the window in a / dream & it means you’re not hungry enough.” These poems make me hungry, if hunger means I must look more closely at many types of pain and the roots of that pain too. If hunger means I will pay attention to the bodies that live alongside me, where they hurt and what it means to acknowledge the hurt bodies that are fully and fiercely HERE. (Tin House Books)

 

 

Starshine & Clay by Kamilah Aisha Moon

Moon’s empathetic attentions seem boundless in these poems, her ability to hold the pain of others and still sing. “The Vulnerable Leading the Vulnerable,” is one way she describes the kind of love her poems describe. Moon’s previous collection, She Has a Name, holds the hearts of a family who love their autistic sister and child. In Starshine & Clay there are other families, other bodies, living and loving the best ways they can. Through surgery and recovery and surgery again, elegy and eulogy and eclogues and eyewitness, Moon never shies away from what it means, for some of us, to be alive. She’s a shapeshifter. One moment full of “sour seed” and “strange plums.” One moment “on a mountain all moonglow / toad moan & green majesty.” I’d wanted to write this review so Moon could celebrate with me the love so many people feel about her work. But we lost this brilliant mind at the end of September, and with her we lost worlds inside worlds inside worlds. (Four Way Books)

 

 

Difficult Beauty: Rambles, Rants, and Intimate Conversations by Lauren Crux

What if your superpower was the ability to see all things at once and to feel it all fully? That’s what it seems like must happen inside Lauren Crux’s brain. What a wonder woman she is! But, as is said in that other superhero story, with this great power comes great responsibility. Crux seems to hold the weight of the world’s burdensome beauty, aware of all that might capture an imagination: “flowers that open when they hear birds,” how “deer raise their heads, stand motionless, then spring into the dry glass,” that “between sky and navy blue is a color called, Tarantula Blue,” that “sharks are freezing to death on the East Coast,” and more and more. The language here is sheer poetry, but these are not meant to be read as poems. They are tiny letters, photographs, journal entries, “rants and intimate conversations,” all of these together and then some. On each candid page, Crux reveals what she sees, how she feels, how she hurts, how she celebrates. “It is the least I can do,” she says in one exquisite ramble, “bear witness.”  (Atmosphere Press, forthcoming)

 

 

Iron, Ardent by Sheila Black

Where these poems happen is often as crucial as what happens in them. The happenings are wrapped up in the environments in which these happenings occur. There are yellowing trees “dying of / that odd, not-really-Dutch disease.” There are “those marks you made, / a line of tracks cutting/ the field.” There are eels inside a drowned woman. There is the gift to “turn myself into/ blue bruise, ragged flower,// chicory stalk by the railroad tracks.” The world of these poems is rich and wild (wild as in weird and, also, wild as in just beyond control), and that world acts on the people who inhabit these pages in deeply fascinating, often surprising ways. I love the almost gothic splendor of these poems, and I love the ways they strange the world so I see even oft-reviled things (and people) as beautiful too. (Educe Press)

 

 

Letdown by Sonia Greenfield

If motherhood makes us mammal (both the women who bear and the babies who are born) then perhaps we are most connected to the greater-than-human world in the moments of live birth (or pregnancy loss) and just after. The long stretch of carrying and caring for an almost helpless human/animal child. Greenfield’s poems are planted in the earth like the bodies of children in a country graveyard and like the budding crocuses of early spring. Birds fly through them. Sometimes safely, other times greatly imperiled. These taut prose blocks live in hospital corridors, in the East River, on neighborhood streets and subway platforms, in a child’s bedroom, and in the heart of a mother learning—through her remarkable, delicate, human and animal child—about the spectrum of what it means to be alive. (White Pine Press)

 

Recommendations from Poet Friends:

Allison Hedge Coke recommends Doomstead Days by Brian Teare

 

This book is a whole worldscape, with pathways through intense visual fieldworks, playing on functional white, silence and space, richly motivated with adept sonic play and succinct and surprising lingual effects. The beautiful and the terrible, the horrendous, are here, juxtaposed in some sound-waving vibe moving with us as we travel alongside Teare’s endeavors in a world whose flesh we share, we breathe through, feel ourselves with. Little floating cloudlike triplets engage with all we know and question in the changing world. Couplets stagger in vertical heaps, doubled up and rowed, hissing as they hit ice. Drop lines enhance both intersections and singular idea. The poetic is keen whether trampling fungus or bacterial earth. Teare’s world is a mighty one, undone, unclean, gorgeous, and miserable. What delightful madness, this is. Must read—again and again. (Nightboat Books)

 

 

Khadijah Queen recommends: The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus

From the opening moment of The Perseverance, with the single line, “There is no telling what language is inside the body,” we understand that we are about to approach a new universe of information in Raymond Antrobus’ clear, unflinching poems. Through the lenses of Deafness and race and masculinity, we grapple with the existential struggle to understand ourselves through our parents and our childhood experiences, alongside the valuable yet mutable nature of perception. There is love in this work, difficult and frustrated and iridescent and traveling through comparisons and conversations with the self and with family, with strangers and with cultural issues at large. Antrobus writes in “Echo”: Even though I have not heard / the golden decibel of angels, / I have been living in a noiseless / palace where the doorbell is pulsating / light and I am able to answer. We expand our comprehension of humanness in encountering these poems, and recognize the limits of language that is only spoken and heard—The Perseverance is language embodied and utterly present. (Tin House Books)

 

C.S. Giscombe recommends The Last Custodian by Stephen Lightbown

 

It’s inventive and apocalyptic and profoundly energetic. (Burning Eye Books)

 

 

Ashley Colley recommends Major Works by John Clare

 

I like that so many of Clare’s poems are unepiphanic. Whether he’s celebrating a snail or lamenting the destruction inflicted on the English countryside by enclosure, he looks closely at the natural world and doesn’t look away, doesn’t look for more meaning. I especially like his animal poems, which are descriptively surprising and humorous, and baldly empathic. (Oxford University Press, USA)

 

 

Kimberly Burwick recommends Old Horse, What Is to Be Done? by Stephen Kuusisto

 

Kuusisto’s newest collection, makes intricate what think we know of blindness. On one level Kuusisto uses birds in motion as floaters to emote what the speaker cannot see, “As a boy I was loud / With rebellions, / Buying birds / For instance, releasing them / In parking lots / Where the grills of Chevrolets / Gleamed in heartbreak . . .” However, the more one reads Kuusisto it becomes clear that the idea of disability is more akin to “ability”. Kuusisto does not only rely upon the other senses, but on global mythologies where “second sight” becomes that visionary intuition. “Now you’re gone / I could transubstantiate / Become an ethereal megaphone / To tell and ask you things / As we did in Helsinki / Side by side / Bundled in raincoats / Scattered leaves flying . . .” (Tiger Bark Press)

 

 

Denise Leto recommends The Clearing by JJJJJerome Ellis

 

The Clearing (released in tandem with an album of the same name) asks how “stuttering, blackness, and music can be practices of refusal against hegemonic governance of time, speech, and encounter.” Ellis expands conversations and creates space for new thinking around history, theory, and lyricism in this remarkable project.

 

 

Brian Teare recommends Calligraphy Typewriters by Larry Eigner

 

From the 1960s to the 1990s, Larry Eigner published dozens of books with small presses that supported innovative mid-century poetry. I often return to the beautiful 1960s and 1970s Black Sparrow volumes in whose pages I first encountered his distinctive visual compositions, his brief lines drifting from the left to the right margin one tap of the tab key at a time. Eigner developed his own version of projective verse through voluminous correspondence with poets and editors and through voracious reading, and the manual typewriter was literally instrumental in helping him to realize the signature form his work took. He was fabulously prolific for over thirty years. Decades before the ADA was passed, his bios in Black Sparrow books always mentioned his cerebral palsy, and in later ones he also described himself as “non-ambulatory.” Though Eigner always acknowledged his disability, his poems rarely mention it; born in 1927, he was not shaped by the disability politics we have come to know. Reading his poems with that in mind, they model ways of attending to embodied experience—vision, audition, and proprioception in particular—and of allowing a poem to acknowledge both what’s coming from outside the poet and what’s coming from inside the process of writing the poem. “good   words,” he writes, “feel how / to do it.” Mingling his own spare lyric phrases with fragments of the views from his windows, of radio and television programs, of magazines and books and his correspondence, Eigner’s mode is transcriptive, notational, precise, associative, and full of white space that lets in both light and quiet. As ephemeral, seasonal, and local as the haiku he loved, his work is equally capable of levity and profundity. For many years, his small press titles have been out of print, but recently University of Alabama Press published Calligraphy Typewriters, a generous selection from Eigner’s singular—and singularly important—body of good words. (University of Alabama Press)

 

Want more poetry recommendations from Orion poetry editor Camille Dungy? Click here.