Mary Jo Bang, The Last Two Seconds (Graywolf Press, March 2015): The cover text jumps at you, curving around the side of a red space-car rushing its passengers toward…adventure? Disaster? The void? These poems are similarly urgent and kinetic—and moving, in all senses of the word. The central concept is time, how it wears down the body and how too little of it seems to be left as we face down doomsday clocks, weather anomalies, and an epic wave of extinctions. And, as Publisher’s Weekly noted in its starred review, her sure, clear voice is a rare combination of the lyrical and the experimental—always surprising but never opaque.
John Hendrix, Drawing Is Magic: Discovering Yourself in a Sketchbook (STC Craft, March 2015): Hendrix’s illustrations may regularly pop up in Rolling Stone and The New Yorker, but this joyous book is anything but intimidating. Combining handwritten text, beautifully loopy drawings, and lots of fun little drawing exercises, the Washington University prof argues that anyone can benefit from keeping a doodle notebook in his or her pocket. (He himself often sketches while in a church pew.) His promise to those “willing swashbucklers” who sketch? Not only will your drawing get better; it’ll actually change the way you look at everything, from clouds to ants to your own hands.
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Ted Mathys, Null Set (Coffee House Press, June 2015): A null set looks like this: { }. It’s sort of a fancy way of saying “zero”—if you’re a mathematician. If you’re a poet, it can become a place to list numbers from 0 to 100, or a portal for the messiness of real life to break though even the most neatly constructed equation. That’s exactly Mathys’ aim in this book—even in poems with titles such as “Hypotenuse,” the cold, logical nature of math is never allowed to crowd out the human (or a sense of humor). Mathys reads with Rebecca Hazleton on May 11, as part of the Observable Readings series, upstairs at Llewelyn’s Pub, 4747 McPherson; for more info, go to stlouispoetrycenter.org/observable.
