The Hermit Poet

For the curious, here’s what I brought back from AWP (and in the past few weeks).
First Books of Poetry

• Barot, Rick. The Darker Fall. Sarabande 2002. (Winner of the 2001 Kathryn A. Morton Prize)
• Chandhok, Lynn Aarti. The View from Zero Bridge. Anhinga Press 2007. (This was the 2006 Philip Levine Prize Winner)
• Chang, Jennifer. The History of Anonymity. University of Georgia Press 2008. (VQR Poetry Series)
• Chen, Lisa. Mouth. Kaya Press 2007.
• Courter, Justin. The Death of the Poem and Other Paragraphs. Main Street Rag 2008. (MSR Editor’s Select Poetry Series)
• Dobbs, Jennifer Kwon. Paper Pavilion. White Pine Press 2007. (Winner of the 2006 White Pine Press Poetry Prize)
• Kozma, Andrew. City of Regret. Zone 3 Press 2007.

Poetry

• Herrera, Juan Felipe. 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border: Undocuments 1971-2007. City Lights Books 2007.
• Rekdal, Paisley. The Invention of the Kaleidoscope. University of Pittsburgh Press 2007 (Pitt Poetry Series). Not bought at AWP, but at UC Riverside’s Writers’ Week.
• Shelton, Richard. The Last Person to Hear Your Voice. University of Pittsburgh Press 2007 (Pitt Poetry Series). Again, at UC Riverside’s Writers’ Week.

Anthology (Poetry)

• Ochester, Ed.  (editor).  American Poetry Now: Pitt Poetry Series Anthology. University of Pittsburgh Press 2007. (Picked up at UC Riverside’s Writers’ Week)

Novella

• Orange, Michelle. The Sicily Papers. Short Flight/Long Drive Books 2006 (Hobart Press sponsored prize). How can you not love & buy a book that is designed to look like a Canadian passport! Hobart is cool.

Non-Fiction

• Gilbert, Sandra M. Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve. Norton 2006. (Purchased at Gilbert’s lecture at USC last week). Also discusses contemporary elegy and the poetry of grief.

Journals

• Barn Owl Review (contributor copies — beautiful cover)
• dislocate
• ELM / Eureka Literary Magazine (run by a long lost friend of mine that bumped into me just outside the book fair)
• Gulf Coast
• Hobart (fiction / creative non-fiction) – one of the best book designers out there
• Juked
• Ninth Letter – brilliant and innovative from cover to content
• Rio Grande Review (bilingual review English/Spanish)
• Zone 3