The blurb project is done. Or what I am now in retrospect calling the blurb project. It has been fun. But I also need a few months off to just power through this prose ms and get some progress on the dumb critical project. So as much as I enjoy the reading, and I've read some good stuff this year in manuscript, I'm making myself say no.

This one last week:
Jessica Smith's Organic Furniture Cellar takes on big issues, such as how to write about the place where you live with all its distractions, beauties, and limitations inact. And she writes out of these questions a beautifully fragmented series of page aware poems. A stunning and necessary first book.

Or what I meant to say, there is something shockingly sweet about this book.

Also last week wrote something out of a readers report for Rachel Blau DuPlessis's Blue Studios.

I wrote this:

Rachel Blau DuPlessis is one of the majors of contemporary US poetry. Her work is a nuanced and responsible calling to feminist consciousness that is never narrow and is always challenging any of our preconceptions. In her critical work over the years she has patiently explained the centrality of female poets and their feminism to the innovative tradition. In her creative work, she has insistently examined questions of what it means to have an ethics, a kindness, in these complicated times. This new collection of essays stunningly continues these reconfigurings, these questionings. Here DuPlessis charts how she became a feminist critic (this essay alone should be required reading), challenges the continuing gendered assumptions of early twenty first century poetries, and also wonderfully and generously reads the work of poets such as Lorine Niedecker, Barbara Guest, and George Oppen.

It was cut to this by the publisher:

Over the years DuPlessis has patiently explained the centrality of female poets and their feminism to the innovative tradition. In this stunning new collection she charts how she became a feminist critic (an essay that should be required reading) and challenges the continuing gendered assumptions of early 21st century poetries.

I can't seem to do blurbs without shaping them like an hourglass: the huge overview gesture, then the detailed this book does this, and then the large optimistic statement at the end. And they keep getting longer and longer.