Firewood and Ashes: New and Selected Poems Ben Howard Salmon Poetry, 2015 A career-spanning collection, Ben Howard’s Firewood and Ashes: New and Selected Poems displays the poet’s lyrical sonorousness, formal mastery, and spiritual inquisitiveness. His most recent poems occupy the book’s opening section, where aging, memory, the beauty of the natural world, and the uncertainty of human endeavor are the poet’s chief subjects. One of the most compelling among these, the titular elegiac sequence “Firewood and Ashes,” grieves for a lost friend in crisp, tersely-composed lines and conjures the final metaphor in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, where the dying body mirrors flame’s self-consumption. We hear echoes of the great bard’s “glowing of such fire / That on the ashes of his youth doth lie” most clearly in Howard’s fifth and final section: Forty years of friendship. One by one they rise, these memories, as if they might resume a story or fashion out of fire a single breathing person. So let those sparks arise, and let that smoke disperse, knowing as we do that even firewood …

Not Nothing: Selected Writings, 1954-1994 Ray Johnson Siglio Press, 2014 People don’t write letters anymore. People don’t even write emails. Ray Johnson wrote letters, an effusion of them, too many to collect. Siglio Press has made two Ray Johnson books. One is the art book and one is the words book and that distinction is hardly useful but Siglio has done its job well—the physical thing of book-making. The words one is called Not Nothing, edited by Elizabeth Zuba, and because of bad planning and itinerancy and profligacy, I own two copies of it. One copy is coffee stained all on one edge and coffee stained deep into the supple paperiness of the cover. The cover feels excellent and looks excellent: 4 stars. 8 stars because of the two copies. 7.5 stars if we take into account the coffee stains. Not Nothing is an archive, but no one writes an archive. One writes a poem or a novelbook or a thingy. Ray Johnson mostly wrote thingies—epistolary poetry squawks or squawking poetic epistles—that he sent through the …