I’m making a few changes around here, hopefully for the better. It’ll take a few days to get everything fixed up, but if in the interim you find something that’s not working (which is likely) please don’t hesitate to let me know. Thanks!

Like James Bond, I recently spent some time in Bolivia (Peru too) and now that I’ve had a week back to readjust myself to this wondrous new reality of Obamamerica–thank you all!–I’ve started culling my way through the 1200+ photos I took there. The first batch of thirty-odd photos is from the three days I spent in Iquitos, Peru. Enjoy!

As of 11:30 this morning, this blog-like entity is on hiatus for the better part of the next month. I’ll be out of the country, and I trust I can leave it to the rest of you to wrap up this election without any nasty surprises. Please don’t disappoint.

–The Management

I recently received in the mail a copy of Kent Johnson’s newish book from Shearsman, Homage to the Last Avant-Garde. It’s something of a selected poems in miniature, collecting work from other books like Epigrammititis and I Once Met, as well as one poem, “Into the Heat-Forged Air,” which first appeared in the last issue of Chicago Review.

Anyone who knows Kent at all will recognize that the advice he offers his son Brooks in “Sentimental Piscatorial”—”stay low, walk slow, / and lay the fly right along the velocity // changes”—is not advice that he seems ever to have much troubled himself with, a fact the world is richer for. His poems are full of prose, indirection, and fun, and his jaunty mock erudition (like the appearance of Roberto Bolaño’s visceral realists in a footnote to “A God”) is possible only because he’s got more than enough of the real thing.

I like Kent’s work because he refuses to hide the ambition and earnesty that drive him, but what sets him apart from his peers is that he also does not mask the embarrassment and self-recrimination that those twin qualities inevitably inspire. This alone makes the book worthy of recommendation, and it’s just barely enough to forgive the fact that digital emunction didn’t make it into “Poetry Blogs (of the Fourth Generation) in Zürich.”

If you’re still not convinced, read Linh Dinh’s take on the book here and then buy it here.