I was an MFA student at Bowling Green State University when this book came out. CHP founding editor Allan Kornblum and his staff had designed a publicity campaign where new readers could order a pair of CHP books for, as I remember, a minimal donation. I got Cid Corman’s And the Word and this book by Heller because Ted Enslin was the visiting poet at BGSU at the time and I’d just begun to learn about the post-Objectivists and Corman’s celebrated magazine, Origin. Heller eventually became a friend and gave a great talk/reading (with Armand Schwerner!) at the Cross Cultural Poetics conference I helped co-organize with Maria Damon at the University of Minnesota in 1996. I still get to meet up with him occasionally at Tal Bagels on First Avenue in NYC. So this book is the “origin” story of so many CHP/poetry world connections for me.

I’ve been a fan of Laird Hunt’s work ever since Coffee House published is excellent early novel The Impossibly. His 2023 book, This Wide Terraqueous World, somehow flew under the radar for most people and didn’t get the attention it deserves. It’s a collection of essays that makes gestures (of many kinds) toward fiction, is Hunt at his best—finely polished and impeccable sentences, willful and illuminating digressions, moments of swerve and surprise. A beautiful and thoughtful book that will change the way you think about the essay as a form.

Borealis is an essay about boredom and terror, exploration, whiteness, ice, desire, birds, and landscape. I mean it’s an essay about Blackness, moose, Alaska, tourism, wildness, space, emptiness, and the future. I mean it’s an essay about escape, daring, water, and grace. How time can fill and unfill a room. What it feels like to watch, to be watched. Text and context in process, how to reorder and reorganize and move in and out, yes, there is a pulse here in these fragments, a relationship, a history, an intimacy with time and place that expands the horizon.

For my money, Ron Padgett is the greatest crafter of the poetic punchline working today. Readers who enjoy Billy Collins and haven't yet tried Padgett are missing out.

Wilkinson is a simultaneously fierce yet tender writer, using his horticultural knowledge and the ubiquity of weeds as a vehicle to discuss family ties, colonialism, and sexuality. I'm astounded by his subtle discernments of such complex topics. Reading this book is like wading through the roots and brambles of life: at times painful, and yet so rewarding.

I love this book for how it plays with and experiments in form. How do we create narratives around nature? An enduring fascination for me.

Most booksellers who write novels are booksellers first, writers second, their knowledge of the market too overbearing to produce Great Works without self-consciousness. But not Mark, who writes with the zeal and confidence of Bellow and Bernhard, a born writer. Mark can convince you of the veracity of anything. His books are also puckishly fun. Reinhardt's Garden follows Jacov Reinhardt as he travels to South America to complete a treatise on the nature and philosophy of melancholy. Haber's questionable historical retellings are full of comedy.