Finding the Top of the Sky, essays by James Grabill. Lost Horse Press, www.losthorsepress.org, $16.95 US. James Grabill, who is widely known for writing at least 10 poems a day, and all of them good, has created a remarkable work in this, his latest. Although labeled as "essays", there a lot of poems in the book, scattered throughout. In any case, those works that appear on the surface to be prose soon prove they are not essays in any conventional sense. They are really poetic essays, often charged with incandescent imagery and associative leaps of imagination. Some of them, like the title essay, for instance, are visionary. Whether riffing on President's Day or exploring a childhood memory, in many ways these could be called "vision quests". James Grabill has finally entered a kind of Nerudean space where anything and everything can fall into his pen. You can almost see the universe flowing out with the ink. This is really a fine looking book, too. My only objection is that I wish Lost Horse Press had included a mailing address somewhere in or on this book though they do provide a web address. Other than that, they clearly do excellent work. This book is highly recommended for poets who are looking to find ways of writing a poetry of ideas that is both emotionally and intellectually compelling. This fine volume opens up a world of possibilities as it breaks down the formal distinctions between the poem and the essay, the memoir and the lyric.

Western Cross, selected poems by Rob Whitbeck, Pygmy Forest Press, 685 Ninth Street, Springfield, OR 97477, CD, $12. Featuring poems from Rob Whitbeck's first two volumes of poetry, Oregon Sojourn and The Taproot Confessions, these 20 tracks will nail you betwixt the eyes. Whitbeck doesn't write like many people out there. Maybe that's because he comes from a place that's as tough, pitiless, and beautiful as the eastern Oregon landscape in lives in. Most of the poets hanging out their shingle in Poetryville USA would go home crying to mama if they had to walk a mile in Whitbeck's boots. Unlike so many university types who talk about the working class (if they talk about us at all) like we were a graduate thesis, Rob Whitbeck is one of us. He walks the walk and talks the talk. He's lived it and earned the right by sheer survival to tell what he sees. With the voice of a folk singer and more street cred than the last 30 years of Pitt Press publications put together, this disc should be in the CD player of every pickup truck between Whitehorse and El Paso. Get it. Take a ride.

Riding A Dark Wind, Poems by Timothy Young, Guitars by Glen Helgeson, 2004, Two Boots Productions, P.O. Box 53, Maiden Rock, WI 54750 (not sure of price, write for details). Spoken words with music. This CD of the poems of Tim Young and various musicians (and featuring the fretwork of Glen Helgeson) is a treat for those who like their poetry delicately spiced with la musica. Timothy Young has been writing quiet poems of grace and power for 30 years and all of his work is a study in sensitivity and humanity. Slip this one on for a winter's Sunday morning and prepare to do a lot of daydreaming out the window.

Marilyn Zuckerman: Greatest Hits, 1970-2000 - Pudding House Press - $8.95. Here is yet another example of how a modest, saddle-stitched chapbook can be worth a hundred of those slick, glossy publications from "name" poets with nothing to say. The 12 poems in this chappie pack a wallop like a horseshoe in a boxing glove. This is the kind of work you wake up in the morning thinking about and stays with you all day until you can get home and reread it. I don't know if these are Marilyn Zuckerman's "Greatest Hits"-that strikes me as a rather silly way of framing a small collection of very good poems. I know enough of Marilyn Zuckerman's work to say that any definitive "Greatest Hits" would be pretty close to a volume of Collected Poems. Still, this is a good selection and Pudding House Press should be commended for publishing it. You should reward them for that piece of publishing wisdom by ponying up with your poetry dollars. No fancy packaging here: just a damn good fistful of poems.

Three O'Clock in the Mottled Afternoon and Ali's Mouthpiece, by Laurel Speer, $4 each, P.O. Box 12220, Tucson, AZ 85732-2220. For more than a decade I've enjoyed the work Laurel Speer. Like many poets and writers whose work goes at right angles to the current mainstream expectations, her poems and prose poems have largely gone unnoticed. She publishes well enough in magazines but, to the best of my knowledge, her many self-published chapbooks have never been gathered into a significant collection. Laurel Speer has a way of writing a prose poem that is like nothing I've ever seen. For anyone who is interested in working in this form, her highly individualistic and iconoclastic prose poems are worthy of study. They are by turns sarcastic, bitter, whimsical, brutal, and brought to us with an unflinching delivery. The best of them will make you think about them for years. Sadly, with these two latest chapbooks, she informs us that after 50 years of writing she will write no more and these are her last efforts at publication. She says she has nothing left to say and anything else would be repetition. Well, maybe so. That's her call. But still I say sadly she is hanging it up because I think it is a loss. There are poets out there (Robert Bly, for instance, or Mark Strand) who I wish would shut the fuck up and quit wasting paper. We could easily make a list a mile long of famous poets whose mouth ran on for decades after they had anything to say. It takes a poet of conscience and integrity to carry on, year after year, working with little or no recognition, writing in spite of it all because she has to—and then, at the end, to step away from it all so gracefully.

Thru the Heart of the Animal Life, a Measure of Impossible Humor, by Christopher Cunningham, Nerve Cowboy Press, $6. Every chapbook I've seen by Nerve Cowboy Press is well designed and this one is no exception. It's a good looking little book. However. The vast majority of the poems in this Nerve Cowboy First Place Chapbook Winner have a first draft feel to them. Only a bare few of the poems here give us a reason to come back to them twice. For someone who claims in their bio note to be a "professional risk taker" I don't see much of it in the work. The postmodern literary DMZ is crowded with poets in too much of a hurry to labor at their craft or expand the emotional, intellectual and structural borders of their poems. The problem with that is this: if a poet doesn't care enough about their own work to put a little effort into its construction then why should we, as readers, care enough to read it? We wouldn't buy a CD where the songs were hastily composed first-take demos nor would we pay top dollar for paintings taken down from someone's refrigerator. There's not much in this chap that could be thought of as political except, perhaps, in a vague Bukowski-esque sort of way. I think it's possible that Cunningham has a good book in him, someday, somewhere down the line—if he can work for it and not rush everything that falls out of his pen into print. This one isn't it.

Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz, by Kent Johnson, $7 Effing Press, 703 W. 11th Street #2, Austin, TX 78701, www.effingpress.com. It's good to see politically oriented poems that aren't afraid to take chances with structure and language. I see a lot of political poetry that is heavy on the political end but a tad light on the poetry. There are good poets of conscience who nevertheless keep mining the same turf, in the same tone, and taking themselves far too seriously for prolonged mental health. Kent Johnson hasn't forgotten that whatever else poetry is, it's also about play and about being willing to experiment. If you don't take a few risks, you'll keep doing the hamster-dance on your wheel and never explore any new territory. I loved the structures in this chapbook. Reading it, you understand that anything can be used to make a poem. It's just a question of imagination. There's a collaboration poem, a prose-poem/flash fiction piece, a poem riffing on a typo, another using the format of an email message and yet another apparently modeling itself from a internet chat room. Does all of it work? I'm not entirely sure, but I applaud Johnson's willingness to try.