I’ve also been reading Jake Adam York’s new book, A Murmuration of Starlings. Jake’s one of my favorite poets writing today. He does this whole “documentary lyric” thing that I find really cool.

A friend just e-mailed me to ensure I hypered over to Ron Slate's blog to see the list he's compiled in an entry entitled "Twenty Poets Name Some New Favorites to Celebrate National Poetry Month." So I scroll down to this:

A Murmuration of Starlings by Jake Adam York (So. Illinois, 2008)
recommended by David Wojahn
York's notes to the volume state that it is "part of an ongoing project to elegize and memorialize the martyrs of the Civil Rights movement." The book proves worthy of its goal. It's a large and sweeping documentary poem in the tradition of Rukeyser's Book of the Dead and Reznikoff's Testimony, with a cast of characters ranging from Emmett Till to Sun Ra. Long poem projects along these lines often seem tethered to their "research" and end up smelling like a library carel—not so York's collection. His struggle with the benighted history of his native South is conveyed with great urgency, and with a terse concision that brings to mind the early work of Heaney. It's a book of unusual ambition and range. – DW

April is not the cruelest month. Not this time anyway. Thank you.