I look forward to every episode of No Slander, a podcast by poets Greg Purcell and Ish Klein. It’s sort of like Car Talk with Click and Clack on NPR, but for poetry nerds.

I just finished We Are Pharaoh by Robert Fernandez. In an interview with Zach Savich at THERMOS, Fernandez talks about his book:

Although the lyric is hard to pin down, it is clear that it would be rash to simply abandon such a rich and potentially transformative reservoir. I think that in We Are Pharaoh lyric language is often in conflict with itself. Conflict is in any case structured into the language of an epoch that pitches itself toward disaster even as survival (the preservation of both one’s life and one’s way of life) is held up as its foremost priority. The book’s particular forces and concerns attempt to mirror this logic. Units of sonic and imagistic intensity are either disparately constellated or constrained by formal logics and the logic of micro-narratives, initiating a struggle between erotics and necrosis, figures and their dissolution, or, alternatively, suggesting a desire for style as transformation, seeing as worlding.

We Are Pharaoh is the third collection I’ve read from Canarium Books. Each one has been amazing. They feel idiosyncratic in every way. I also recommend Moving Day by Ish Klein and The Wasteland and Other Poems by John Beer. Canarium just released its publication schedule into 2013, including Anthony Madrid’s first book.

Do you know Greying Ghost? I feel like editor Carl Annarummo is probably an android sent from the future to provide the world with an insane proliferation of perfectly constructed, painstakingly singular chapbooks and pamphlets. Seriously, the only way he could publish so many rad writers is if he had a brain like a supercomputer and the nimble fingers of Data from Star Trek.

The people at Augury Books are quietly doing wonderful things, publishing an eclectic series of poems on their web site. The mix of new and established writers is rad. And their taste in poems is weird and engaging. I think they are also releasing their first book sometime next year, but don’t quote me on that.