Cracked Slab Books

From back cover: "...Michelle Noteboom's first collection of poems weaves together obsessions about skin and body, desire and violence, science and sensuality....Noteboom takes us on a poetic exploration of skin as border between self and world, of language as limit between self and meaning."

MAP OF THE HYDROGEN WORLD, Steve Halle's first collection of poems, shuns the divide between post-avant and Official Verse Culture poetics by embracing traditional forms while simultaneously developing new ways of working through poetry. From traditional lyric and narrative poems to formal experiments, Halle finds his own way through history, art, politics, faith and self. "Ginsbergian incantation, high modernist allusion, post-avant rhizome and the documentary collage--these are the weapons in Steve Halle's arsenal. Joyce, Eliot, Emerson, Whitman and Keats shoot through the static of text-messaging, global positioning systems, surveillance culture, and an urgent sense of the world's victims. Halle carries a humanistic heritage into an inhuman world. "--Robert Archambea