This book, the second in a series of books subtitled 'from Unincorporated Territory,' requires - more properly, demands - careful study and consideration from both poetry-readers and historians alike, as it constitutes an ambitious act of historical recovery that challenges even as it educates. from Unincorporated Territory, Craig Santos Perez (Omnidawn Publishing, 2010). Kopel is a leading figure in the coming-up generation of poets who believe in a poetry that is fun, performative, New York School-allusive (catch the sly Wilco references here), and vigorously alive - which is far more than can be said of the implicit and sometimes explicit self-unmythologizing of those older generations whose prominent characters either never sought out, never found, never made joyously functional, or never successfully maintained such exacting bonds with their peers.Ĥ. Kopel's Victory is another defining moment in the lifespan of American poetry, a moment in which our youngest and most promising poets see peeking through the gloom-and-doom of the poet's lot the possibility, too, of generative half-boheminan, half-institutional communities and the sort of cross-fertilization only possible in such close-but-frenetic quarters. If we can only take so much of this, well, that's true of any aesthetic enterprise, and what's equally clear is that we must not have less of it.

So long.' (from 'Duende-Tripper') and half the rueful 'y life can save no song' (the very next line of the same poem). The positioning is half the bright 'So what. These poems move at the speed of thought, which can make their confessions seem salutory rather than enervating, their disjunctions as evasive as pixie dust rather than heartrendingly ogreish, their sentimental gestures hit-and-miss (and often intentionally so). Victory hails from this tradition-of-recent-vintage, and finds its home in a collective oeuvre that also includes other work produced along the I-80/I-90 Iowa City-to-Amherst corridor (with detours at various loci in Ohio and New York), such as that from Adam Fell, Emily Pettit, Mark Leidner, Laurie Saurborn Young, Nate Pritts, and Matt Hart. Of late, the postconfessionalist poem has gone supernova: In evidence, more and more, is the uncanniness of Apollinaire, the psychic expansion of Whitman, the reverence of Hopkins, the absurdities of Padgett, and more generally the mark, everywhere, of the contemporary - which is to say, postmodern - context in which all this suffering (and partial triumphs over same) strut the stage.

Victory, Ben Kopel (H_NGM_N Books, 2012).

Madame X by Darcie Dennigan