Chicago Review’s Autumn issue (53:2/3) is back from the press and avail­able now for only twelve dol­lars. Buy a copy today!

POETRY in the issue includes Book V of Ronald Johnson’s Radi os (enti­tled “The Book of Adam”); “Rising, Falling, Hovering,” the second half of CD Wright’s long poem about the Iraq war (the first half of which was pub­lished in CR 51:3); and poems by Larissa Szpor­luk, William Fuller, Sarah Gri­d­ley, Roberto Har­ri­son, Mark Tardi, John Peck, Erín Moure, Oana Avasili­chioaei, and Elisa Sampedrin.

FIC­TION includes five short sto­ries by Peter Markus and Jede­diah Berry’s “Minus, His Heart.”

CRIT­I­CISM in the issue includes a defense of real­ism by Georges Perec and a long con­sid­er­a­tion of Hart Crane by Allen Grossman.

The issue also includes a three-​part con­ver­sa­tion on gender in con­tem­po­rary poetry, with an essay by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, a response by Jen­nifer Ashton, and a note by Joshua Kotin and Robert P. Baird.

REVIEWS in the issue include:

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The autumn 2007 issue of Chicago Review is at press and avail­able to pre-​order.

(The issue will be mailed in early October.)

The issue fea­tures: the second half of “Rising, Hov­er­ing, Falling,” C.D. Wright’s long poem about the Iraq war; Book V of Ronald Johnson’s Radi os; an arti­cle on fem­i­nism and inno­v­a­tive poetry by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, and a response from Jen­nifer Ashton; essays by Georges Perec (on real­ism) and Allen Gross­man (on Hart Crane). Plus the next install­ment of Kent Johnson’s twelve-​part crit­i­cal novella, a review of J.H. Prynne’s “To Pollen.” And much much much more.

The full table of con­tents is posted as a pdf on CR’s web­site and is sum­ma­rized below.

Pre-​order the issue now!

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The Lyric Touch: Essays on the Poetry of Excess, John Wikinson’s book of mostly-​collected crit­i­cism, is now out from Salt. The essays’ main sub­jects are poets who came of work­ing age during and just after the British Poetry Revival: John James, Denise Riley, Dou­glas Oliver, J.H. Prynne, and Tom Raworth. A few Amer­i­can poets (John Wein­ers, Robert Cree­ley, Mina Loy) attract his atten­tion as well, and the book includes two essays (on Mar­jorie Welish and Andrea Brady) that made their first appear­ances in Chicago Review.

(The next issue of CR will include Wilkinson’s response to Peter Riley’s letter about Wilkinson’s review of Simon Jarvis’s Uncon­di­tional. For Robert Archambeau’s jaunty sum­mary of that debate, see here and here.)

The ques­tion Wilkin­son returns to time and again in his crit­i­cism has to count as one of the cen­tral ques­tions facing any poet work­ing today: can there be lyric poetry that is not some­how Roman­tic? What both wor­ries and thrills Wilkin­son about Roman­ti­cism is its excess, an excess capa­ble of both frus­trat­ing and inspir­ing the dream of polit­i­cal jus­tice. But what is poetry with­out excess? In a sense, this is the same ques­tion that Amer­i­can visual artists were grap­pling with forty years ago, when mod­ernism gave way to min­i­mal­ism and, in Michael Fried’s terms, art yielded the stage to objects.

(For a clear and con­vinc­ing demon­stra­tion of the polit­i­cal impli­ca­tions of Roman­tic atti­tudes about art—also a useful sum­mary of one of the Frank­furt School’s favorite arguments—see Wolf Lepenies’s Tanner Lec­tures, The End of “German Culture.” [PDF])

Wilkinson’s sub­jects are not mere props for his own the­o­riz­ing. As he writes in the intro­duc­tion, one of the essays’ major objects is to sat­isfy “an intense need to argue, for myself as well as for others, the value of poets scarcely heard of when I was writ­ing. This is the kind of thing poets should do, and which the acad­emy should better appre­ci­ate and promote.”

The Lyric Touch is avail­able from Salt and from Amazon, as is his recent book of poems, Lake Shore Drive (Amazon | Salt)

…of the Archive of the Now, here’s one of the most impres­sive read­ings of a poem (”Cocaine” by John Wein­ers) I’ve ever heard.