Poetry | FrogenYozurt.Com - Online Literature Magazine

Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism by John Updike

On November 29, 2011, in Book Reviews, Essays, Nonfiction, Poetry, by Editor

A collection both intimate and generous of the eloquent, insightful, beautifully written prose works that John Updike was compiling when he died in January 2009. Updike’s criticism is gossip of the highest order, delivered in an intimate and generous voice.

“Something Urgent I Have to Say to You”: The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams by Herbert Leibowitz

On November 28, 2011, in Biographies & Memoirs, Book Reviews, History, Nonfiction, by Editor

Leibowitz’s biography offers a compelling description of the work that inspired a seminal, controversial movement in American verse, as well as a rounded portrait of a complicated man: pugnacious and kindly, ambitious and insecure, self-critical and imaginative.

Rome and Rhetoric: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar by Garry Wills

On November 27, 2011, in Book Reviews, History, Nonfiction, by Editor

Renaissance plays and poetry in England were saturated with the formal rhetorical twists that Latin education made familiar to audiences and readers. Yet a formally educated man like Ben Jonson was unable to make these ornaments come to life in his two classical Roman plays. Garry Wills, focusing his attention on Julius Caesar, here demonstrates how Shakespeare so wonderfully made these ancient devices vivid, giving his characters their own personal styles of Roman speech.

Leaving the Atocha Station – A Novel About A Young American Poet by Ben Lerner

On November 10, 2011, in Book Reviews, Fiction, by Editor

In prose that veers between the comic and tragic, the self-contemptuous and the inspired, Leaving the Atocha Station is a portrait of the artist as a young man in an age of Google searches, pharmaceuticals, and spectacle.

The Wrecking Light – A Poetry Collection by Robin Robertson

On October 23, 2011, in Book Reviews, Fiction, Poetry, by Editor

Robin Robertson’s fourth collection is an intense, moving, bleakly lyrical, and at times shocking book. These poems are written with the authority of classical myth, yet sound utterly contemporary.

Kindle Edition: Piano Rats – A Poetry Collection by Franki Elliot

On October 18, 2011, in Amazon Kindle, Book Reviews, Fiction, Poetry, by Editor

Piano Rats is a collection of delectable prose poetry by a young Chicago writer that calls herself Franki Elliot. What’s it about? It’s about you. Something you said to me five years ago, five days ago, five minutes ago. It’s about sex, honesty, sadness, falling in and out of love, firsts and lasts, awkward moments. It’s my secrets and yours.

The Back Chamber – Poems by Donald Hall

On September 13, 2011, in Book Reviews, Fiction, by Editor

In The Back Chamber, Donald Hall illuminates the evocative, iconic objects of deep memory—”a cowbell,” “a white stone perfectly round,” “a three-legged milking stool”—that serve to foreground the rich meditations on time and mortality that run through his remarkable new collection. While Hall’s devoted readers will recognize many of his long-standing preoccupations—baseball, the family farm, love, sex, and friendship—what will strike them as new is the fierce, pitiless poignancy he reveals as his own life’s end comes into view.

The Toothbrush – Poetry by Author John Patrick Doyle

On September 11, 2011, in John Patrick Doyle, by John Patrick Doyle

The toothbrush stands erect within its jar. It wears its life in skirmishing so far

Life on Mars: Poems by Tracy K. Smith

On August 27, 2011, in Book Reviews, Fiction, by Editor

With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. In these brilliant new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like “love” and “illness” now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence.

Disaster Was My God: A Novel of the Outlaw Life of Arthur Rimbaud by Bruce Duffy

On August 7, 2011, in Biographies & Memoirs, Book Reviews, Nonfiction, by Editor

Arthur Rimbaud, the enfant terrible of French letters, more than holds his own with Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde in terms of bold writing and salacious interest. In the space of one year—1871—with a handful of startling poems he transformed himself from a teenaged bumpkin into the literary sensation of Paris.