Books and Music – Page 55

April 3, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Gospel Earth by Jeffery Beam

“A big book of little poems,” says the press release. Except not all the poems are little, and not all the contents are poems. This is a sprawling book, an unruly book, and as I read I vacillate wildly between admiration and impatience. Perhaps that’s fine. Some of my favorite prose works are similarly undisciplined: Zhuangzi, Moby Dick, Gargantua and Pantagruel, and lord knows the Bible. Not bad company! Still, my editor’s hand itches as I read yet one more page of superfluous epigraphs that serve only to overwhelm the micropoems that follow, and titles that lie heavily on certain poems, closing off alternate interpretations. I feel as if I’m on a nature trail with too goddamn many signs to tell me what I’m seeing.

Maybe reading a book like this straight through is a mistake, but after reading for an hour or so I found I was beginning to miss the signs of human civilization that are nearly impossible to escape on this globe, especially in the places Beam identifies as the origins of these poems, places in Italy, France, Ireland and North Carolina. Where are the roar of jets, the rumble of motors, the jarring clutter of powerlines and subdivisions? Then, too, despite a fine homage to William Carlos Williams, who famously declared “no ideas but in things,” there’s a relatively limited vocabulary of images which after a while feel more like ideas and less like real things: wind, water, tree, sun, etc. The book begins to feel narrow despite its girth. The nature mysticism begins to feel unearned, and the persistent vatic tone starts to ring hollow for me.

It is of course unfair to complain that this isn’t quite the book I would’ve preferred to read, but I’m not trying to write a fair-minded review, simply share my response as one particular reader with my own set of biases. The thing is, I found a great deal to like, too. I penciled little checkmarks in the corners of pages I liked, and flipping back through the book now, I see that I’ve marked at least a quarter of all the pages, which if I extracted them with an exacto knife would make a book about 50 pages long. Even in the section of the book called “Green Man,” almost all of which I would’ve jettisoned had I been Beam’s editor, I find some lines that strongly resonate:

In order to make sense
of the ground
I build an earthen hill & sit upon it
(“The Green Man’s Man”)

Another longish poem, “Foggy Mountain Sutra,” has two lines I’d love to see alone on the page:

Anxious to waken anxious to go out
What grey bones dance me to my grave

A short poem called “Resurrection” has so much I like, I am itching to white out the title and the last word, which sits in a stanza by itself:

What late fire-dragons
fume from my body
What purples
What frosts

The night tastes bitter

Dawn’s
moss on my tongue

Beauty

And don’t get me wrong: there are poems where I wouldn’t change a thing, such as “Treatise of the Daisy.” (Well, O.K., the typographic daisies separating the three sections were a bit much.) And here’s a poem where both the interpretive title and the vatic tone seemed just right:

Revelation of Beginnings

The cities pray but
not for long
Soon they will bend

Wind
Tall grass

There’s a poem just three words long, including the title, which I really admired —

Thrush’s Parable

Tree

— though I suspect that if you aren’t familiar with the wood thrush, hermit thrush or veery, it will probably make you shrug.

One more example shows I think the kind of gnomic quality that Beam was going for in many of the poems, here with great success to my ear:

The Visitation: Moth

No flame to explain me

The section called “MountSeaEden” was my favorite. None of the poems in this section have titles at all (except in the Table of Contents — an interesting compromise), and we’re told they originated from “Traversing the Healy Pass, Caha Mountains, Beara Peninsula, Ireland” with two companions in Autumn 2006. They seem appropriately light and free, and their cumulative effect lends power to the individual parts, where mountain and sea are blended to dizzying effect.

Sand in sandal

Leaf-print on pillow.

is one poem, and here’s another I really liked for some reason:

Thrifty mountains

bright & mineral

where herds graze
where saxifrage assumes

I hope I don’t seem like I’m damning this book with faint praise. I got it as a review copy, but if I didn’t own it and I saw it in a bookstore, I would probably buy it, because I do love micropoetry and there’s a lot here to admire and learn from. Beam clearly understands how brevity can make a piece more suggestive and powerful. I just wish he’d applied that lesson to the whole book.

I’m reading a book a day for Poetry Month, but I’m also hoping some folks will join me and fellow poet-blogger Kristin Berkey-Abbott to read four of those books, one a week starting April 3 — or even just one of the four. Details here.

April 2, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Blameless Mouth by Jessica Fox-Wilson

There are — it occurs to me as I finish this book — too many love poems in the world, and not nearly enough poems about desire. But before I sat down with Blameless Mouth this morning my attitude was, I’m ashamed to say, more skeptical. I’d read two or three of the poems quickly, like a shopper, like a consumer, like one of the protagonists in this book: wanting it, maybe on the strength of the elegant cover, but not really sure I needed it. How original, I said to myself, poems about hunger — one of those words like bone or stone or scrim or palimpsest that makes me raise an eyebrow when I encounter it in a poem. The title of the book even comes from a line in a poem called “Hunger.” Yikes! But as the lead singer of the legendary underground thrash-metal band Violence once said: If you’re gonna call yourself that, you’d better be able to deliver the goods. And, as it turns out, Fox-Wilson definitely delivers the goods.

The book has what I guess you could call a fugal structure, with the same stories repeating in different keys: Eve and the apple, Grimm’s fairy tales, a child in a shipwreck, a placeless Middle American upbringing, the blandishments of glossy magazines. Even the sort-of title poem appears again at the end of the poem, as “Hunger, Revised,” which is such a cool idea I wish I’d thought of it first. One effect of this was a kind of obsessive feel that intensified as I proceeded through the book, pausing only for lunch. Fox-Wilson may not be the first American poet to tackle the subject of consumption and consumerism, but why should she be? There could hardly be a more crucial topic for our national discourse, should we ever decide to have one. And off-hand, I can’t remember the last time I saw it done so well.

O.K., this is the part of the inevitably inadequate review where I try to compensate for its inadequacy by quoting liberally from the book under consideration. I like animal poems, so naturally “Feeding Habits of Foxes” would’ve appealed to me even without the clever autobiographical turn at the end:

I think I am afraid
of my own natural red hair,
point of my teeth, my silent
stalking ways. No matter

which cage I put you in,
I cannot escape
our common name.

In “Waiting for Snow White,” a girl standing in line with her family at Disneyland has her menarche. The opening lines set the scene perfectly:

I waited in line for the ride when it happened,
swallowed in a thick red stream of sweating, sunburned
tourists.

One of the magazine poems is called “I Turn the Page, Like Waving a White Flag,” a title which could almost stand on its own as a micropoem. It ends with the speaker wistfully recalling “my life before// all my purchases,” a moment in her childhood when she sat on a swing eating a slice of watermelon with uncomplicated pleasure, how delicious it was, and

how I giggled
with my mouth still full. Where is my receipt

for that moment? I need to know. What was
the price for that young girl’s joyful pink heart?

Due to following a lot of blogs by Buddhists and those influenced by Buddhism over the years, not to mention my own environmentalism, I suppose I’ve been led to consider this topic of wanting and the mental habits that feed it more than most people. So I think it would be unfair of me to make very much out of the three or four poems in the book that struck me as less than amazing, because they may strike readers not as accustomed to the topic as essential. What’s really worth focusing on here is that the book as a whole is engrossing, inventive and never descends to didacticism as it wrestles with its sexy but disturbing questions: “Can we teeter together/ on this knife’s edge/ of having and wanting”? “[W]hen I finally/ touch the center,/ what will I find”?

April 1, 2011April 18, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Movie Plots by Nick Admussen

This is syncretism at its most perverse — idiosyncretism, if you will: the word made celluloid, the world herky-jerking past in a series of unplayable movie pitches. Our hero is an author with half a mind to leave us in the lurch. You print the pages yourself following instructions on the web, fold them into the stiff gray cover they send you in the mail and prick your fingers with a needle sewing it together, all for five dollars: Epiphany Book Kit No. 1. Thirty poems square as movie screens, albeit mostly taller than they are wide, set in a font from 1680. I start them while I am making breakfast and overcook my eggs, but the eggs, eaten with “Murder Mystery,” are still delicious. It is not the first time I’ve read the poems, but it’s the first time I’ve read them in the intended order. This time I see how each movie begets the next, but I lose the sense I had the first time of being in on the joke, perhaps because I am imagining how I would film them: Nick’s text as script for a documentary narrated by someone more sonorous than God, or perhaps dribbled out into closed captioning while something entirely different plays on the screen, such as footage from a minicam strapped to the head of a dog or the security cameras from a 24-hour peep show, though the latter might be so meta as to cause a feedback loop. Without reopening the book, what stuck with me? Bullets getting married, a knife-ship big as a house, a superhero named Peace who saves the day with one eye-popping blow, the Zhuangzi butterfly turned into a sci-fi virus, the wit, the energy, the sense of things flying out of control, the desire to stay in the theatre for another long read.

March 28, 2011September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Join the Via Negativa Poetry Month book club!

On March 2, I announced plans to again read and blog a book or chapbook of poetry a day throughout April. Many thanks to all who sent review copies (and if I promised a copy of Odes to Tools in return, I’m planning a trip to the post office soon!).

A number of people expressed interest in my regimen, but understandably, only a couple indicated they might be following suit. Today I want to invite y’all to join me and Kristin Berkey-Abbott in a somewhat more modest undertaking: to read and discuss just four books of poetry next month, one a week. Here’s what we’ll be reading:

Week #1: Diane Lockward’s Temptation by Water
(Publisher’s page, Amazon.com, review in Rattle)

Week #2: Luisa A. Igloria’s Trill and Mordent
(Publisher’s page, Amazon.com, review in Galatea Resurrects)

Week #3: Ren Powell’s Mercy Island
(Publisher’s page, Amazon.com, review in Velveteen Rabbi, review at Carolee Sherwood’s blog)

Week #4: William Trowbridge’s Ship of Fool
(Publisher’s page (be patient), Amazon.com, review in Gently Read Literature)

We welcome participation in any form, but we encourage you to borrow or purchase all four books and read them at your leisure. Kristin and I will both be blogging our responses (which may or may not resemble traditional reviews), and if you’re a blogger, we encourage you to do the same, and let us know about it so we can interlink. Discussion can take place in multiple blog comment threads. Critical responses are welcome as long as they are constructive, not snide or dismissive.

Kristin and I will also be interviewing each of the four poets by phone for the Woodrat Podcast, insh’allah. If you are able to read the books in advance of our phone calls, we’d welcome suggestions of what to ask and which poems to have them read on the podcast. So here’s when we’ll be doing that: April 9, Diane Lockward; April 13, Luisa A. Igloria; April 23, Ren Powell; and April 25, William Trowbridge. Also, I could be persuaded to include one more person in those conference calls, so let me know (bontasaurus[at]yahoo[dot]com) if you want in on any of them.

A word on how we selected these four. I emailed Kristin the complete list (as of a couple weeks ago) of books I was planning to read next month, and we went back and forth about it. Obviously we are both guilty of bias in favor of friends and poets who are active online. Some friends didn’t get considered because we didn’t learn about their new books soon enough. But I will be looking for podcast guests long after April… including, I hope, my co-conspirator in this, who is a wonderful blogger, poet, and theologian, and seems remarkably sane for a Floridian.

Finally, for those of you who can actually contemplate parting with favorite poetry books, I want to echo Kristin and put in a plug for a Poetry Month-related initiative by Kelli Russell Agodon which I strongly support in theory if not in practice: the Big Poetry Giveaway 2011.

Basically, bloggers give away 2 books of poems at the end of April. The first can be your own book, and the second is to be a FAVORITE book of poems of your choosing.

People will come to your blog and leave a comment saying they’d like to win your book and at the end of the month, you randomly choose two winners and mail them out the books.

March 27, 2011September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Link roundup: Nanopressing, bombs not food, and carnivores after dark

Nanopress Publishing: alternative poetry publishing, with gravitas
The indefatigable Nic S. has set up a website to advocate the new model of poetry publishing she’s pioneering with her own book, Forever Will End on Thursday (which I’ll be blogging next month).

The nanopress is a single-publication, purpose-formed poetry press that brings together, on a one-time basis, an independent editor’s judgment and gravitas and a poet’s manuscript. The combination effectively by-passes both the poetry-contest gamble and the dwindling opportunities offered by existing poetry presses, while still applying credible ‘quality control’ measures to the published work.

Join the discussion about this new paradigm at Nic’s blog — in particular, a post titled “Nanopress poetry publishing: Avoiding the publisher’s cycle of need.” Beth Adams, Ren Powell, Sarah Busse, and Rachel Barenblat are among the contributors to the comment thread so far.

The Washington Post: “In the Mideast, U.S. policy is still driven by realism” (Eugene Robinson)
Is it realism, or is it surrealism? It is certainly frustrating the way we never seem to have money for anything but destruction. We can only laugh to keep from crying: The Daily Show for March 21 was devastating.

The Palace at 2:00 a.m.: “The House of Words (no. 1)”
Novelist and poet Marly Youmans kicked off what she promises will be a 25-part series “on persisting, giving up, and other topics” connected with the writing life.

Giving up writing is easier than persistence because–surprise!–nobody much will mind if you give up. It’s not like giving up a job with a salary; there are few reproaches, and in fact many of your near-and-dear will heave great buffalo sighs and snort with relief. People will be glad to think that you may be a solvent person some day, rather than a struggling writer with the usual garret, heaps of foolscap, and bargain Toshiba laptop.

The New York Review of Books Blog: “The New American Pessimism”
Charles Simic is smarter than your average poet.

They say the monkey scratches its fleas with the key that opens its cage. That may strike one as being very funny or very sad. Unfortunately, that’s where we are now.

t r u t h o u t : “Instead of Bombing Dictators, Stop Selling Them Bombs”
But Gaddafi promised he’d only use them on terrorists!

NewScientist: “Fake tweets by ‘socialbot’ fool hundreds of followers”
“The success suggests that socialbots could manipulate social networks on a larger scale, for good or ill.” Good idea. I’ve heard that terrorists can use Twitter and Facebook to foment unrest.

xkcd: “Beauty”
It’s not every day that I get to read a web comic about my favorite organism, the dog vomit slimemold.

O: Maria Shriver interviews Mary Oliver
I’m not entirely sure who Maria Shriver is — some sort of Kennedy, apparently — but somehow she managed to lure the famously reclusive poet out of her shell. (And I’m pleased to see O magazine devoting its April issue to poetry. Here’s the New Yorker’s review.)

Finally, here are a couple of videos from Plummer’s Hollow that complement this past week’s podcast, “Creatures of the Night.” Thanks to our neighbors Troy and Paula for doing such a great job documenting the local wildlife with multiple trail cameras and sides of venison for bait.

Watch on YouTube.

March 2, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Books needed for Poetry Reading Month

Last April, I read and blogged about a book or chapbook of poetry every day (except for the two days I took off to produce poetry-related podcasts), and this year I’m planning to try and repeat the performance. A few people have already sent me review copies, but I’ll be happy to add more to the pile, which has 21 titles in it so far. Click on the foregoing link for examples of the kind of response-post I tend to write. My postal address is on the Contact page. (But email me first to make sure I don’t already have the book.)

Incidentally, in the comments to my summary post last year, I talked about possibly launching a site to promote the idea of an International Poetry Reading Month as an alterative or complement to NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), but I decided I just don’t have the time for one more project — especially if I’m hoping to do this myself. Besides, experience has shown that I am spectacularly bad at organizing and motivating other people. But if anyone wants to join in, I’d love the company. If you’re pressed for time, try just reading a chapbook a day. The point — for me at least — isn’t to see how much I can read, but to see whether I can bring my full attention to what I do have time to read (taking time off from looking at the news, catching up with Facebook and Twitter, etc.). I also don’t require myself to read only recently published books, or books I’ve never read before: any book of poetry is fair game, so long as I read or re-read it from cover to cover that day.

Another freedom I might allow myself this year is to listen to a collection of poems as an alternative to reading some mornings. For example, there are now five audio chapbooks from Whale Sound to choose from, and any one of them would be worth another close listen. For those who consider this a daunting project, by the way, note that the total listening time for these chapbooks seems to range between 9 and 21 minutes. Most people could fit that into their morning commute.

February 27, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Link roundup: Dingles, thunder thighs, and a journey through a poet’s brain

The Awl: “Being Female”
I know I’m a little late with this, but the issue of discrimination against women in publishing and reviewing isn’t going anywhere, and Eileen Myles’ response to the troubling data released by VIDA last month really cuts to the chase.

So I wrote five pages of pussy wallpaper and gave it to the editors at VICE who did publish it but confided in me that the money people really had to be convinced that it was not entirely disgusting. With all the dirty and violent and racist things that VICE has done, this was um a little troubling. Do we really want to send that kind of message to our readers. What kind of message is that. I guess a wet hairy soft female one. I mean a big giant female hole you might fall into never to be heard from again.

Wicktionary: “dingle”

A small, narrow or enclosed, usually wooded valley.

How can I have lived in a dingle for 40 years and not known it? “Plummer’s Dingle.” Hmm.

Plummer’s Hollow blog: “Fisher caught on video in Plummer’s Hollow”
More great trail cam footage from our neighbors, Paula and Troy Scott, this time of a fisher, which is a once-extirpated and still rare species of large mustelid, bigger than a pine marten but smaller than an otter.

O.K., I know some of you don’t want to click through and read my deathless prose, so here’s the video:

Watch on YouTube.

Wordyard: “Another misleading story reports that blogs ‘r’ dead”
The New York Times had a kind of half-baked article last week titled “Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter.” This has become a persistent meme on the part of the old media, and probably represents wishful thinking, because the data don’t bear out the contention. Scott Rosenberg’s response was right on the money:

Maybe we’ll end up with roughly ten percent of the online population (Pew’s consistent finding) keeping a blog. As the online population becomes closer to universal, that is an extraordinary thing: One in ten people writing in public. Our civilization has never seen anything like it.

So you can keep your “waning” headlines, and I’ll keep my amazement and enthusiasm.

The New Yorker: “The Arrival of Enigmas: Teju Cole’s prismatic debut novel, ‘Open City’”
To say that James Wood loved Open City might be an understatement. “Teju Cole has made his novel as close to a diary as a novel can get, and his narrator is both spectator and flâneur.” (As close to a diary? Don’t you mean blog?) Also, if you’re a reader of the Sunday Times, I think you’ll find a glowing review of Open City there, too.

BBC: “Dinosaur named ‘thunder-thighs’”
More like karate thighs. (The artist’s conception is great!)

Yale Environment 360: “Alien Species Reconsidered: Finding a Value in Non-Natives”
Science writer Carl Zimmer examines some new studies suggesting that total eradition of invasive species might not always be the best idea: for example, “Introduced cats were eradicated from Maquarie Island off the coast of Australia, after having driven two of the island’s bird species extinct. But with the cats gone, an introduced population of rabbits exploded, devouring the native plants.” Read the comments too, though. (via Chris Clarke on Twitter)

Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog: “Interviewe wyth Margarethe Atte-Woode”
Advyce for beginninge makeres of ficcion and poesie. Ful heartily Ich LOLd. (via Nic S., who incidentally is also guest-blogging at Best American Poetry this week)

Watch on Vimeo.
Hannah Stephenson did a screen-capture video of the composition process for one of the poems she blogged last week, then speeded it up by about ten times. Be sure to expand it to full screen by clicking the four-arrows icon on the lower right, so you can read the poem as it grows and mutates. This is more or less how I work, too, except that I can’t listen to music while I’m writing. In her blog post about it, Hannah says, “It feels a bit like I’m inviting you into my brain…welcome! Come on in.”

February 20, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Link roundup: Photosynthesizing salamanders, revolutionary women, and single-sentence animations

Nature News: “A Solar Salamander”
Holy cow! New research shows that the spotted salamander, a common species here, may be partly solar-powered thanks to a mutualistic relationship with a photosynthetic alga inside its cells, something previously unknown among vertebrates.

CommonDreams.org: “‘So This is America’: Veteran Ray McGovern Bloodied and Arrested At Clinton Speech”
Apparently wearing a peace t-shirt and turning your back on the Secretary of State is considered provocative behavior. Even if she happens to be talking about the rights of peaceful protesters.

Heraclitean Fire: Read the World challenge
Harry Rutherford is a blogger’s blogger — someone who seems able to say something insightful on nearly any topic, from art to birding to football, and never gets stuck in any particular groove. His Read the World challenge is an on-going series of book reviews in which he attempts to read at least one book from every country in the world.

Haiku News
This is not news about haiku, but news in haiku — and good haiku, not the folk kind. Their motto is “the personal is the political is the poetical.” I’d like to see more poetry zines responding to the news in this way. Such as…

Verse Wisconsin: Poems About WI Protests
An on-going collection (scroll up for the call for submissions) proving that the news isn’t always what it seems. For example:

The state of Wisecrack is facing an immediate deficit of $137 milquetoasts for the current fishmonger year which ends July 1. In addition, bill collectors are waiting to collect over $225 milquetoasts for a prior raid of the Patriarchy Compensation Funeral.

Al Jazeera: “Women of the Revolution”
Three Egyptian woman talk about their experiences during the revolt.

Moving Poems forum: “Electric Literature’s single-sentence animations: videopoems for fiction”
Electric Literature magazine’s video series proves that, at least where film adaptations are concerned, sufficiently artful prose is indistinguishable from poetry.

The Observer: “What does the Arab world do when its water runs out?”
Conserve?

Part 2 – Part 3

If you care about freedom, in Egypt or anywhere else, or use social networks, watch this. (FOSDEM=Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting.) Eben Moglen is head of the Software Freedom Law Center. In this address (part 3), he announces the formation of a new foundation to create a truly decentralized, tyranny-proof internet. Awesome.

Phoenicia Publishing’s February sale on qarrtsiluni print editions
Now through the end of the month, receive $2.00 off on our four print anthologies, including the new “Words of Power.” Details on website.

February 13, 2011September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Link roundup: Tenrecs, monostiches, kale and other wonders

The New York Times: “When Democracy Weakens”
Bob Herbert wishes Americans would take a cue from the Egyptians.

NPR: “An Immigrant’s Quest For Identity In The ‘Open City’”
I have been reading the glowing reviews for Teju Cole’s new novel with great pleasure, but it was especially fun to hear this interview come on the radio while I was kneading bread this morning. I was all like, “Hey, I know that guy! I’ve published his stuff at Via Negativa and qarrtsiluni!” So good to see a member of the old blog neighborhood make it big.

Grant Hackett: Monostich Poet blog
I don’t link Grant’s poems in the Smorgasblog because they’re too short to excerpt — a monostich is a one-line poem and he excels at them. I don’t know anyone who packs more mystery and suggestiveness into such a small space. He used to blog at Falling Off the Mountain, but took that site offline late last year. On the new site, he seems to post at the rate of about one or two poems a day.

Moving Poems forum: “What comes first, the video or the poem?”
Check out the variety of responses to my question from videopoets at all skill levels. I am going to have to remember to throw out questions to the community like this more often.

Voice Alpha: “To read or to recite? Dramatic versus Epic”
Dick Jones — poet, musician and retired drama teacher — wades into the debate about how best to present one’s poems to a crowd. Surprisingly, perhaps, given his background, he comes down rather decisively on the side of reading.

Call for Submissions: Festival of the Trees 57 with Rebecca in the Woods
Rebecca is one of the best young naturalist-bloggers out there, so we are very lucky to have her as host of the next Festival of the Trees.

Linebreak: “To Failure:” by Christopher Ankney
My first reading for Linebreak, a magazine I admire. Don’t know the poet from Adam, but I know the subject all too well! It was fun to learn the poem this way, over a series of half a dozen takes, even if I was a bit too tired to give it as good a reading as it deserves.

BBC Earth News: “Madagascar’s elusive shell-squatting spider filmed”
Speaking of failure, check out the first spider in this clip from the redoubtable David Attenborough & co. (a win for photography and evolution). Then there’s…
“Bizarre mammals filmed calling using their quills”
Tenrecs! Stridulating!

(Watch on YouTube)
In a rare trip off the mountain, a chance remark at the coffee shop led me to discover that I was surrounded by fellow kale afficionados, and one of them later sent me the link to this video. What used to be an obscure vegetable back when we started growing it in the garden in the early 70s has now apparently achieved cult status. Who’d have thunk it?

February 12, 2011 by Dave Bonta

How to write a book review

Read quickly. You’re not being paid enough to spend quality time with this book, and besides, you can usually tell within the first five pages whether the author has written the book you want to read, or something that merits only scorn. You can try opening it at random and reading ten different pages to get a flavor of it. Or make like Marshall McLuhan and read — or rather skim — just the odd-numbered pages.

If it’s a novel, you’re not supposed to give away the ending in any case. Reading all the way to the end is for suckers and college interns eager to suck up to the editor. The important thing is to demonstrate critical acumen in the review, which is best done by adopting a tone of lofty condescension, unless the author is a friend or someone who might conceivably be asked to review your own next book, in which case you are better off to hail the work as groundbreaking while at the same time naming other writers in the same genre to which is bears a close resemblance. These writers can be selected more or less random — the more off-the-wall the comparisons, the more you’ll come across as eclectic and perceptive (not to mention well-read).

Important note: don’t be too hasty in emailing this off to your editor. Fact-check to make sure you have the basic details right, such as the main character’s name and situation. If you screw that up, you risk blowing your cover and looking like a total dumb-ass.

Poetry is a trickier case, but one rarely encountered by the professional reviewer, since so few major publications want to risk driving away readers with reviews whose sole value is to garner a little extra high-brow credibility for the publication. If you are called upon to review a book of poetry, the safest approach again is to open the book in a number of places at random. Select four or five reasonably interesting quotes, decide what they likely mean in the context of the book as suggested by the blurbs and publisher’s description, then decide whether or not this is the sort of poetry you like and respond appropriately, either with fulsome praise or scathing condemnation. Since the American poetry scene is riven by factionalism, such extremes of rhetoric are the norm.

Poetry review editors also sometimes ask for three or four books to be included in the same review. On the surface, this might seem to make your job even harder, but not really. Now you only need to find one or two exemplary quotes per book, and their greater variety will push you to greater heights of creativity in your connective prose. If you’re really feeling puckish, and if the publication isn’t one that specializes in poetry, deduce a trend. Whatever you do, don’t engage with the subject matter of the poems, unless to belittle the poet (Sharon Olds’ obsession with sex, Mary Oliver’s rhapsodies about nature). You’re better than that. Remember, poetry is all about language, in the same way that painting is all about paint. Leave the achingly sincere analyses to the Christian Science Monitor and small-time bloggers.