Poetry News

Contemporary best-sellers this week

By Harriet Staff

This week’s contemporary best-sellers list features a number of new works from established poets. Pulitzer Prize-winner Jorie Graham enters the list at #8 with her latest collection, Place. Graham’s thirteenth book of poetry examines “the ways in which our imagination, intuition, and experience…aid us in navigating a world moving blindly towards its own annihilation.” Fellow veteran poet Patti Smith debuts at #27 with her new work, The Coral Sea, a poetic homage to her friend, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Two items varying in form but of equal note arrive on the latest smallpress best-sellers list. Topping the list at #1, Tan Lin’s cross-genre Heath Course Pak “exists somewhere between a Project Gutenberg version of Samuel Pepys Diary and a minute-to-minute news feed and blog of Heath Ledger’s death.” Adhering to a more traditional mode, Robert Grunst’s Blue Orange joins the list at #12. In the poet’s second collection, the “shrewd and true” poems reveal “both an older and more brightened sense of the world.”

Posted in Poetry News on Friday, May 4th, 2012 by Harriet Staff.