I’ve never liked blurb writing. It reminds me of the Taoist maxim “do all by doing nothing,” the blurb version being “Say nothing by saying all.” But with Angie Estes’s new book, Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City, the blurb writers have nailed it: “moving between artistic/literary history and the perils of human desire” (Mark Irwin), …
Lessons with Scissors is Jeanne Marie Beaumont’s fifth book, and this is old home week for many of its poems, which came out first in The Manhattan Review. She has also seen her verse play acted on the stage and is a visual artist known for collages and assemblages—an interest which shows up in the book as “Bebe Marie” where Joseph Cornell’s doll figure gets inside a viewer’s brain.
Peter Krumbach’s book of prose poems, already adorned with the Antivenom Poetry Award from Denver’s Elixir Press, sits at the axis of two poles—Czechoslovakia and surrealism. Krumbach left Czechoslovakia long ago and has lived in Southern California for 25 years, but he was born in Brno and stayed long enough to earn a degree in Visual Arts.
