That all book sellers with sites online will add samples of each book.

A line a paragraph, ideally a page, and I can tell something…Some novels do it. A table of contents is fine for a text book but for poetry, front and back covers and index is not useful.

A cover, a price, a name, does little good but use bandwidth. A blurb or review by the author or publisher is suspect. Hearsay doesn’t help me. Flash-based doesn’t help. No search on site doesn’t help. Clear navigation is a bonus. No index of all titles? Fine, I can grudgingly accept. A bio? Fine for general knowledge but doesn’t help a bit with the purchase decision. Access in person is rare for what I’m looking at. What the site offers may be all I get. Do I buy? Default answer is no. With more of a sample, that can be flipped to a risk of a yes.

I can judge what I like from a phrase. A review at site sometimes will give at least that much.

Can standard practice change? Yes. Will it?

All I want for new years is…to not be impeded in finding what resonates by those who may have it and want to sell it, but play keepaway.

The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination by Ursula K. Le Guin who is even more brilliant than I expected. How did I not encounter this intelligence before?

A Book of Kells: growing up in an ego void by Margaret Kell Virany is the story of her parents who never spoke of themselves, reconstructing their biographies with sharp eye to details of life at the time. It really takes on into the context. I’m only on page 30 yet, but quite absorbing. Found this thanks to the small press fair and am only getting around to reading it now.

Plato’s Republic which I read once in primary, once in secondary but about time to come back for another reading.

How to Rock Climb by John Long. Oh my. The back of my neck can break out in a sweat by looking at illustrations alone. And hand sweat for pages. This is odd.

Margaret Atwood’s Selected Poems (1976). Funny, I think I actually like some of this. Rather a lot. Eating own words. Mm, nummy.

I’m Not Going to Lie to You by Mike Blouin. Lovely sounds and voice and stories. How did I end up setting this down on page 68 months ago.? One more advantages of a house move is discovering what you forgot you had. The poem of his father, describing his arms as girlish now and hoping dad would kick his ass for saying so is going to live in me I think.

Once by Rebecca Rosenblum, still reading too but slower. Not a matter of diminishing returns but avoidance of it ending. Each short story is so vivid and wowser lines here and there.

Tom C. Hunley admits a preference for say it how it feels clearly in layman’s terms. He was asked by Robert Lee Brewer “In your opinion, what makes a good collection?”

“Arranging poems into a collection is a lot like arranging lines into a poem. I think there should be the same kind of movement, from problem to solution, from buildup to crescendo, from exposition to denouement, whatever it may be. ”

More of the interview here

The concept of what is beside what, the order of revelation, the relationship between small bits, each with their own amplitude wave and the collection as a whole taking on a distinct curve interests me now. Whether the small bits are poems, songs, paintings, photos, anecdotes, facts or whatever, they should stand alone and become differently interesting when they work in concert in a larger context into something also coherent.

Each part adds some new angle yet chimes melodiously and melds somehow, as ingredients in well-prepared food don’t struggle against each and by being together spoil or overpower the other. Similar enough to fit, distinct enough to add layers without becoming discordant.

Each element is like a haiga, or a news illustration, or an image with a caption. Each singly should hook. They shoudn’t wholly repeat one another. It has to have some element in common, some way to relate to the other elements so it can be understood. Our brains understand the world in terms of a sense of story and transitions through rhythm.

Even with no words and only a drum beat, some connection from sound to sound, some commonality helps us sort and organize and convey the elements for us to make context and therefore sense. If that is done with too much commonality it feels oppressively controlled and our sense of agency is frustrating. We can’t engage with something that we are entirely the passive receiver of. We need in some way to stretch to be the builder.

This idea of an overall movement comparable to a novel’s story in emotional ride is interesting. Our cut off line for how much work we want to put into, and how much hand-holding, spoon-feeding we need varies with where we are at, how much overlap our life has with the communication.

If the orientation to understand what we are seeing is already in us, then we have the range to make large leaps. It is already speaking our language. If there’s a rapture between what we know and what is being communicated, we need more interim steps to come forward to gather and lead us. The connection points are culturally embedded knowledge.

When a cluster of ideas (verbal, visual, auditory or a combined narrative pieces) are put together, for it to feel like a quilt, depends on what connections we can make ourselves. It is part of the job of the curator to put compatble pieces together that show off the other pieces and make an overarching piece.

How similar? How different? Some magazines have the fit so tight that an issue feels like one voice. The net effect sedates. Some collections of best of poems are bound best of anthologies without an eye to it being one work. It feels incidentally in one place by one person but doesn’t feel complete. The balance is to make something that has a sense of greater arc of story or can run as several parallel weaves as well to feel cohesive, tongue in groove.

When someone writes a review, what is the target outcome?

There are 5 audiences it serves:
a) the editor who publishes it who needs copy that will engage readers
b) the writer of the review who is engaging with the book, community and work
c) the writer of the work being reviewed who gets feedback and a chance at promotion so ideas will be read and maybe even bought
d) the readers who will grasp the work and like it as a peer and/or as a purchaser
e) the readers who will not have their needs/wants met by the work but now knows something about the reviewer or writer or publisher of the work and of the place that reviewed it

Can a review be impartial? Can a person ever be? Are we Vulcan? Would that make us objective?

Personal opinion is going to come into a review. This isn’t necessarily bad. If one tries to be too impartial, it becomes a muttered lame conversation. Personality may come into a review. That may add color or may just distract.

The point is: Does the review offer value? For who?

Is the review written to entertain and inform? Does it tell tone and subject matter of what is reviewed? Does the reviewer get what the writer is trying to do and where the writer is on the spectrum of career and take that into account?

A negative criticism is more useful before poems become published than after it’s set to page. If we go by 95% of everything is garbage, a negative aspect isn’t exactly news. We’re all in the stream trying to pan for gold dust, and sometimes even a nugget we can go to town on.

Who is served by a positive review? A book of poetry is lucky to get even one review anywhere. Is it the job of the reviewer to teach poetics or use it as a platform to promote their own school of thought? It can be like reading a horror fiction reviewer criticizing a romance novel as if it were missing gore. If that one review is scathing, what’s been accomplished? If the review is looking only on the positive side, what’s been accomplished? It doesn’t need to be skewed one way or the other. It is to be conversation. A conversation hotly condemning or avoiding anything but flattery gets old fast.

A good review should be informed of what the writer is trying to do.

Shout outs of lines that clanked or lines that resonated is part of the dialogue. Bland glowing reviews is more a back-patting isn’t interesting. (It may support the poet which is useful individually and collectively.)

Sandwiching 75% good around negative points might be a good rule of thumb. It’s a delicate thing, a writer’s ego and the placement of words to indicate what is the weak point in a book without being overly harsh about it. Fair is relative. The review reflects the reviewer in the writing community as much as it does the work.

The poorest reviews are slanted language with a lot of self-reference to the reviewer. Which isn’t to say its not informative or amusing but doesn’t take me far in understanding if I’d like to chase down the work.

The review is to give an idea of what to expect from the work. The more that can be said of the work in comparison to past works, or, like movie reviews, to contemporaries and comparable titles, the more helpful it is.

When I enjoy a review and find it helpful to assess whether I want to check out a work personally the review had quoted the work. Citing examples for the reader to judge for herself is often the most useful part of the review. Just 50 words or 30 is enough to give me access to whether it suits my taste. It saves me going online or to the bookstore and finding that book in particular. The book review is a little thicker index than name, rank and number.

If added to a sense of the writer bio and sample and take on what drives the writer, the context the writing is coming out of, a sense of who the writer is, I also get an understanding of what is being picked up on as pertinant and why and the qualities a poet excels at, so much the better.

I’ve done this probably half a dozen times somewhere or other but desktop is a surging sea so the book of the day to the tap from JimK. It’s a slight variation, lines rather than sentences.

–Go to a nearby book.
–Go to page 56
–Quote the 5th line and the next 2 lines.
–Pick another set of people to be tagged.

Nearest book is A First Bilingual English/Punjabi visual dictionary.
(No sentences and only 4 lines per page.) 5th concept?

nalsaaz: plumber.

2
deFORMed
gAg

from one that actually has a 5th line, Rampike, The Invention of Language by Kim Goldberg, but isn’t a book technically,…

And because things are better in 3s, and because that was a dud of an excerpt in isolation, here’s a snippet from one with, paragraphs…Gramma Knows the F Word: How to Discover More Fun in Your Life by Tedd Schredd:

“Plan it out in stages. Don’t get ahead of yourself and don’t expect big changes immediately. You make your life happen, it is not something that just occurs.”

Alright, who wants to do the meme today? Nomination ballot now open.

btw, The new season of A B Series is up including a sound performance troupe from Australia coming to the NAC.