Books Acquired Recently

Abraham, George. Birthright: Poems. Minneapolis: Button Poetry, 2020.

I heard Abraham read in a virtual reading last week. I had never encountered his work before, but was completely blown away by it and decided to order his book right away. The reading was through an independent bookstore in Pittsburgh, and they had a link to order the poets’ books through bookshop.org, which is a new website run by independent bookstores to give them an online presence as an alternative to amazon.com. They are taking extra precautions to keep their warehouse workers safe during the pandemic, and their service was fast anyway. I highly recommend them!

Galasso, William Scott. Rough Cut: Thirty Years of Senryu. Laguna Woods, CA: Galwin Press, 2019.

I recently read a review of this book in Frogpond and decided to buy it as a result. I’ve been writing senryu myself lately, but it is hard to find collections or anthologies of them, so I was excited to hear about Galasso’s book.

López, Casandra. Brother Bullet: Poems. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2019.

López read with Abraham, and was also wonderful, so I ordered her book too. She read from a memoir in progress as well, and that was even better than her poetry–I’m excited to read it once it is finished.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.

I’ve been reading a lot about Sedgwick’s work lately and decided that I should read more of it myself. This is an essay collection that gets cited all the time in queer theory. I will say that these ridiculous one- or two-word titles that some academics use for their books drive me nuts because they tell potential readers nothing about what the book is about. A brief subtitle (e.g., Tendencies: Essays on X, or Tendencies: X, Y, and Z) would work wonders.