Richard Kraft with Danielle Dutton, Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera (Siglio, 2015): “Follow me!” urges the cat on the cover, speaking in bright pink text. Heed her fluorescent words and you’ll go on a bent, wild, and yes, operatic image/word trip. Kraft began with an old Polish comic book about a spy, collaging up the original frames with pictures and speech bubbles from myriad other sources: Hindu comics, vintage encyclopedias, sports ephemera, Jimmy Swaggart Bible stories, and material more akin to bibles of the Tijuana variety. The result is both exuberant and artful. St. Louis professor and fiction writer Dutton (the force of nature behind the publishing project Dorothy) provides 16 “interpolations”—lyrical prose interludes that match the images’ fiery energy, joule for joule.
Nathaniel Farrell, Newcomer (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015): This book is ambitious in scope—it’s a book-length poem, otherwise known as an epic—but it’s written in a clear, simple, humble voice that is approachable and never overblown. Told from the point of view of a maybe–maybe not Civil War foot soldier, it succeeds in being many things at once, including nature poem and alternate reality military history. (P.S. If you’re reading this on a Tuesday night, turn on KDHX and keep it turned on till 11 p.m., when Farrell signs on for “Cure for Pain.” It’s one of the best shows on the station.)
John Shoptaw, Times Beach (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015): Though he teaches at Berkeley now, Shoptaw grew up in the Bootheel and was even baptized in a drainage ditch, a story he relates here in a poem. The book, which took 12 years to write, is a conceptual journey down the Mississippi, beginning with a series of what he terms “blues haiku” and encompassing all the plants, animals, people, and stories connected to the river, from the headwaters in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. Stop-offs along the way include the backward-flowing river during the New Madrid earthquake and a nod to the dioxide-contaminated Missouri ghost town of the title.
