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i arrogantly recommend…#72 is a mostly monthly review column of unusual, overlooked, ephemeral, small press, comics, and books in translation by our friend, bibliophile, and retired ceiling tile inspector Tom Bowden, who tells us, “This platform allows me to exponentially decrease the number of views on screens by people who have no use for such things.”<\/p>\n
Links are provided to our Bookshop.org affiliate page<\/a>, our Backroom gallery page<\/a>, or the book’s publisher.<\/p>\n Read more arrogantly recommended reviews at: i arrogantly recommend…<\/a><\/p>\n Hannah Brooks-Motl\u2019s spare and accessible poetry presents verse as an extension of nature and spirit, eschewing monied materialism and the scientific method for taking delight in what has already been given to us. Many of Brooks-Motl\u2019s lyric poems (there is one prose poem) consist of lines one to three beats long in straight columns, word groupings that emphasize an image or idea. But she also likes to cast long lines across the page showing how free verse can look as an additive to the poem\u2019s semantic content. (But even these long lines often include caesurae of one to three beats.) Either way, she tilts toward the concrete. Here is the volume\u2019s last poem, the fifth entitled \u201cPoverty Mountain\u201d:<\/p>\n Sleep in a field Direct contact with nature\u2014sensual pleasure translated by the mind into psychic contentment. Although she asserts that \u201cecstatic personal austerities \u2026 make up Art\u2019s heart\u201d (\u201cPoet Dilemma\u201d), the emotional registers I read in these poems is more meditative silence than Whirling Dervish. (The possible exception may be \u201cAnts,\u201d a five-part poem on a species of ant able to protect its colony by exploding itself when attacked by would-be invaders.)<\/p>\n Hannah Brooks-Motl\u2019s poetry treats lyric form as a site of quiet communion, favoring in her language concreteness and attentiveness to nature over abstraction or reification (and thereby falsely simplifying the experiences). Across alternatingly spare and expansive lines, her poems translate sensual contact with the world into meditative unity with the contemplated.<\/p>\n Selma Asoti, originally from Sarajevo, poetizes, in Say Fire, of the siege of that city that occurred during the early 1990s and after the conflict, measuring the harms inflicted and their lingering impact on survivors. She comments on her father and an uncle, men who don\u2019t talk about what they did to protect themselves and their families to survive, which are juxtaposed with poems about being a lesbian in the US, looking for dates with the weight of survival, menace, and coping as her baggage. I imagine three hooks in the hallway. On the first a winter hat, on the second a coat, and on the third, a pineapple grenade hanging by the trigger. I imagine his broad shoulders and the grey hair at the back of his head as he approaches and takes first the coat, then the grenade, then the hat. As he turns to face the door on the left I see his profile, the stutter of capillaries under his ear. That line\u2014\u201cThat\u2019s not how it happened\u201d\u2014ends several poems here, undermining the sureness with which matters are related\u2014did these events, then, not happen, happen other than as reported, happened but are denied by survivors? One poem, however, of a nature similar to others does not have that line. Is this what really happened, then? But the outcome of that poem are similar to the poems whose events are denied having occurred. At any rate, while citizen-soldiers returned their guns after the conflict of Sarajevo, they didn\u2019t always return the grenades they were given: the consequences haven\u2019t yet played themselves out. it never ends. some other names Pity is impotent to change the past, present, or future. What Faulkner noted of his fellow Southerners\u2019 dispositions holds true for Asoti?\u2019s Sarajevo: \u201cThe past is never dead. It’s not even past.\u201d<\/p>\n Compiled from his 15 poetry collections in Spanish, You\u2019ve Heard This One Before marks Karmelo C. Iribarren\u2019s first collection in English and John R. Sesgo\u2019s first book of translations to be publish, established and rising talents joined to make a remarkable book. I read the poetry before Sesgo\u2019s introduction (which is helpful in delineating the aspects of Iribarren\u2019s poetry lost in translation), and thus was not surprised to find listed among Iribarren\u2019s English-language influences Bukowski, Bukowski\u2019s hero John Fante, and Raymond Carver (erring more toward Carver in his sense of form and punctuation). Today Bohumil Hrabal, the Czech writer, wasn\u2019t a poet, but his concerns were often similar to those expressed by Iribarren: Enjoying lazy days alone and with friends, an admiration for cats, the confusions of love, emotional weather reports, and so on. I\u2019ve been looking Strongly recommended.<\/p>\n Brazilian poet Astrid Cabral\u2019s poems about poetry, which make up the contents of Spotlight on the Word, are simultaneously poems about being in the world, how to listen, watch, and feel. They describe the limits of language\u2014not every experience has its verbal correlative\u2014and their gestures toward transcendence and self-knowledge. \u201cPoetry Asks for My Hand\u201d illustrates this condition:<\/p>\n Poetry asks for my hand, In conjunction with the role of the word in shaping meaning, Cabral also acknowledges (like John Cage) meanings found in and expressed by silence in the book\u2019s second half, a condition often overlooked by language-hungry poets. Here is \u201cSilent Language\u201d:<\/p>\n The word of the deaf-mute Alexis Levitin brings to his translations of Cabral\u2019s poetry a naturalness of expression and observation that makes me eager to see Cabral\u2019s earlier works, which she\u2019s best known for, that focus on Brazil\u2019s natural habitats and environmental degradation.<\/p>\n The avant-garde poetry of Gerhard R\u00fchm (b. 1930, Vienna) combines elements of concrete poetry, performance art, and audio collage\u2014with, in The Folded Clock<\/strong>, a focus on numbers. As R\u00fchm states in the postscript,<\/p>\n the number, at least as far as structure goes, is the common denominator of all the sundry forms of art. . . everything visible and audible \u2026 can be traced back to purely numerical relationship and can therefore also be translated from one dimension to another.<\/p>\n Thus, The Folded Clock<\/strong> includes poems comprised of random numbers from 1 to 100 and poems scored for recitation of word and number combinations\u2014pieces that seem to be oriented toward sound quality rather than semantic content. Conceptual art plays a roll here, too: \u201ctime poem,\u201d if recited to R\u00fchm\u2019s specifications, takes a year to declaim, with the last 30 seconds of the year being the longest stretch of recitation at any previous point in the poem. someone who dies of the heat meets someone whose died of the cold. the former\u2019s got a question but doesn\u2019t have any air. the latter might respond were it not for his mouth frozen shut. And so forth up to a million.<\/p>\n My favorite, though, is \u201cmortal intercourse,\u201d which concerns the interconnected lives of four people who are identified only as the first, sixth, tenth, and eleventh. Here are two stanzas; nice bit of soft-shoe with the punctuation:<\/p>\n the first appraises the sixth, Includes collages and drawings. I\u2019m sure this will become a classic of avant-garde poetry. Hats off to Alexander Booth for this fine translation.<\/p>\n Although the book\u2019s title, The Death of a Greek Lover,<\/strong> suggests both anonymity and body count, its emotional depth and range focus on a specific man with whom the novelist and poems David Plante shared his life for 40 years. The title reflects the poems\u2019 emotional restraint and Plante\u2019s intention to give classical form in memorial to a significant personage, his lover the poet Nikos Stangos.<\/p>\n Plante sets his love and life in Greece within the historical and mythological continuity of the landscape and the figures that shaped and haunt it. The overall effect is cumulative; no one poem stands as a signpost tied to another signpost with lesser poems between them. Each poem embodies an aspect of the whole, a belief in underlying, eternal love. Here is one of the book\u2019s untitled poems:<\/p>\n Do it, believe in the Gods, that they R. J. Dent\u2019s translation of Stories, Tales, & Fables<\/strong> is an excellent introduction to the Marquis de Sade\u2014not just his fictional persona, but the person himself as revealed in his essays and assessments of his works by other writers (without the distraction of weighty scholarly apparatus and throat-clearing). The eponymous stories, tales, and fables that comprise the bulk of the book are consistent in their narratives with the obsessions of Sade\u2019s lengthy novels, and, although written while Sade was imprisoned, feature amiable narrators of good wit and taste, as well as a flair for irony. He was the O. Henry of his day.<\/p>\n Sade was an admitted libertine: He felt that consenting adults ought to be able to do with themselves as they saw fit. Troubles arose, hypocrisies grew, marriages failed, and crimes were committed when natural urges were suppressed, including those of minority or esoteric pleasures. Yes, Sadism as we understand it today occurs among the stories, tales, and fables, but it is inflicted on the antagonists, the hypocrites who inflict upon the world, expect of others, standards other than they themselves live. The punishments don\u2019t incur sexual pleasure\u2014they are doled out because someone else was denied sexual pleasure. (Sade himself was forced into an arranged marriage with a woman he was no attracted to but whose sister he was\u2014an affection that was shared, and punished.)<\/p>\n The rights of libertinage extended, for Sade, to hetero- and homosexual women and homosexual men, and the relationships they chose for themselves. Consensual, mutually desired sex is presented as the hottest sex there is.<\/p>\n Of the essays by Sade presented here, \u201cSome Thoughts on the Novel\u201d shows Sade at his discriminating best, a man who took advantage of the superb education his background afforded him rather than piss it away as an expectation of a privileged life. He is indeed a man of wealth and taste, well-grounded in not only Greek and Roman classics (including not a few now relatively forgotten), but also up to date on authors throughout Europe during his own time as well. He evaluates rhetoric, plot, convention, and character. An astute reader, he has discerned from literary history what a compelling narrative requires and has attempted, at least, to apply it to his own fiction.<\/p>\n This anthology ends with essays on Sade (with varying degrees of appreciation) by such writers as Apollinaire, \u00c8luard, and Anatole France, providing biographical and bibliographical background on Sade, if only touching lightly upon the complex issue of Sade\u2019s various imprisonments over 32 years.<\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/01_Ultraviolet.jpg\")
Ultraviolet of the Genuine<\/a><\/strong>
\nHannah Brooks-Motl
\nThe Song Cave<\/p>\n
\nTake off your clothes
\nPsychically
\nThat\u2019s probably
\nWhat heaven means.<\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/02_Say-Fire.jpg\")
Say Fire<\/a>
\nSelma Asoti
\nArchipelago Books<\/p>\n
\nIn her prose poem, \u201cUncle,\u201d she writes,<\/p>\n
\nThat\u2019s not how it happened.<\/p>\n
\nThe consequences of living under siege never ends, even after the siege has. As Asoti? writes in \u201cLessons from war,\u201d<\/p>\n
\nare now bleeding on CNN\u2019s chyron, instead of your burning house
\nthe screen shows a man giving his child
\nto a soldier. his hands are the hands of your father,
\nor the father of your father, same difference.
\nyou are somewhere, among the blessed, on some square
\nyou sip an espresso, the woman next to you says
\nhow awful, your contempt blooms precious and pure.<\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/03_Youve-Heard.jpg\")
You\u2019ve Heard This One Before
\nKarmelo C. Iribarren \/ John R. Sesgo
\nWorld Poetry Books <\/a><\/p>\n
\nIribarren\u2019s lines are spare, language vernacular, and topics mundane: observational, epigamic, and ironic, as in his \u201c98 Degrees in the Sun\u201d:<\/p>\n
\nI\u2019d rather be
\nin a frosty city
\nup north
\n\u2014or more precisely,
\nin a typical bar
\non the square
\nof such a city\u2014
\nwatching everybody run past
\nshivering under umbrellas,
\nwith you, making plans
\nto spend the summer
\nsomewhere warm.<\/p>\n
\nHere\u2019s one for commuters, \u201cRush Hour, Highway\u201d:<\/p>\n
\nat the highway
\nfor a few minutes now.
\nThere\u2019s a traffic jam, as always
\nat this hour.
\nI picture
\nthe weary faces,
\nfrazzled
\nnerves,
\nworn-out patience
\nready to burst.
\nI wonder
\nhow many are heading home
\nquite simply
\nbecause there\u2019s nowhere else
\nto go.<\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/04_Spotlight.jpg\")
Spotlight on the Word
\nAstrid Cabral \/ Alexis Levitin
\nWorld Poetry Books via Asterism<\/a><\/p>\n
\nwhispering close to my ear:
\npick up pen and paper. Take off
\nyour clothes, they get in the way.
\nThrow out that daily mask.
\nLet\u2019s go to the realm of the rare
\nby the impassable ways
\nof the buried labyrinth
\nwhere your bonfires burn
\nand shadows in sorry huddle together.
\nFreed, come now to forge a path into
\nthe jungle, to plumb the river\u2019s depth,
\nto penetrate caverns and stars.
\nAfterwards, contemplate the page:
\nthere, in words, they will be,
\nyour heaven and your hell.<\/p>\n
\nnestled in the gaze
\nflows discreet, unspoken,
\nnever behind a back or shoulder blade.
\nAnd so it casts its filaments,
\nweaves and interweaves warp, woof, weft,
\nand gets to join in the general game.
\nThe word of the deaf-mute
\nignores the gift of sound
\nand relies on the subtle dance.
\nEthereal design of fingers
\nthe casting of arms in arcs
\na face of expressive features
\nreveal all that is hidden.
\nNot every word is born
\nin the hollow of the throat,
\nthe space between the lips.
\nMany spring to sight
\nfrom the signals of an entire body.<\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/05_Folded-Clock.jpg\")
The Folded Clock<\/a><\/strong>
\nGerhard R\u00fchm \/ Alexander Booth
\nTwisted Spoon Press<\/p>\n
\nThere are also silly prose poems like \u201cclimate change: a joke that gets out of hand\u201d:<\/p>\n
\ntwo others who died of the heat meet two others who died of the cold. both of the former have questions, but don\u2019t have any air. both of the latter might respond were it not for their mouths frozen shut.<\/p>\n
\nwho goes without the tenth,
\nwho recognizes the eleventh.
\nthe eleventh takes care of the first.
\nthe first discusses the sixth,
\nwho desires the tenth.
\nthe tenth opts for the eleventh,
\nwho nourishes the first.<\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/06_Greek-Lover.jpg\")
The Death of a Greek Lover<\/a><\/strong>
\nDavid Plante
\nNYRB Poets<\/p>\n
\nCalm the wild wind ravaging the fields,
\nThat they make dark rain
\nCease for sunlit ploughing
\nAnd turn the heat of summer
\nInto air currents that flow about the trees,
\nAnd for belief in them a beaker of water
\nDrawn from their river Hades
\nWill bring a dead man back to life.<\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/07_Sade-Stories.jpg\")
Stories, Tales, & Fables<\/strong>
\nMarquis de Sade \/ R. J. Dent
\nContra Mundum Press<\/a><\/p>\n
\n
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