Best Sellers for the week of July 4, 2010

Anne Carson’s book Nox is, according to Meghan O’Rourke at the New Yorker, “a luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of an elegy, which is why it evokes so effectively the felt chaos and unreality of loss.” It is also in the number 2 spot on this week’s contemporary best seller list, just behind W.S. Merwin’s Shadow of Sirius. Debuting on the list this week is Richard Moore’s Writing the Silences, which appears for the first time at number 11. Friends with Kenneth Rexroth and a longtime producer of public television (including the magnificent USA: Poetry series), this is Moore’s first book. Bomb Magazine says Moore’s poetry “expands itself in the off-handed dialect of this country's newest voices, but remains rooted to the old codes of keen sincerity.”

Here's a clip of the Moore produced and directed short film about Frank O'Hara from 1965: