Pleased to announce the publication of my new book, Some Alphabets, just out in the Opuntia Books series of Agincourt Press. It is available to order here at SPD.
The back cover copy reads:
* * *It’s in the gnarled wonders of its diction that John Latta’s poetry has its most immediate charm. The 130 poems of Some Alphabets fizz between levels of diction—the demotic, the formal, the high theoretical, the archaic, the futuristic, the expansive, the pinched, the ordinary and the just plain weird—so that every sixteen-line stanza becomes a foray into the delightful unexpected.
Latta has always had a way with words, a kind of weighty insouciance everywhere evident in Rubbing Torsos and Breeze, his previous collections: the ability to spin out simultaneously concrete sensual observation, offhanded bon mot, and penetrating insight. Some Alphabets focuses that linguistic multi-tasking to an abbreviated, impacted pitch, and stirs into the mix a dark and glittering compost of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century language. . . . “Stubbled profligate, I / Paw th’ancients, who paw me.”
—Mark Scroggins, in the Introduction
Born in 1954 in Willow Run, Michigan, John Latta spent early childhood in the Pigeon River Country of northern lower Michigan, and later attended high school in Ann Arbor. He was educated at Cornell University (A.B.), the University of Virginia (M.F.A.) and SUNY at Albany (Ph.D.). Since 1997 Latta has worked in Hatcher Graduate Library at the University of Michigan, in a variety of positions.
Latta’s first collection, Rubbing Torsos, was published by Ithaca House in 1979. A second collection, Breeze, won the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry (selected by John Matthias) and was published in 2003 by the University of Notre Dame Press. Between 2006 and 2014 Latta kept a lively blog called Isola di Rifiuti.
Poems collected in Some Alphabets originally appeared in the following publications: 1913: A Magazine of Forms, American Letters & Commentary, Backwards City Review, Bird Dog, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Cello Entry, Chicago Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Conundrum, Critical Quarterly, Crowd, Damn the Caesars, Electronic Poetry Review, Epoch, Famous Reporter, Fence, Free Verse, Gam, Good Foot, Harper’s, Intercapillary Space, Jacket, LIT, Magazine Cypress, The Modern Review, Near South, New American Writing, The New Review of Literature, No: A Journal of the Arts, Notre Dame Review, Origin, Parakeet, Poetry Review, The Poker, Puppy Flowers, Rossocorpolingua, Skald, Sonora Review, Typo, Vanitas, Verse, Where We Put Our Hats, Xantippe, and Your Black Eye.
* * *Three sample poems:
DAUNTING
A daunting map is all
We got, smudgy-ink’d in
Green relief. It lends airs
Of disbelief to our fever’d
Marginal lot. Books we read
Are the sort antiquarians recommend—
The frenzy of a zealot’s
End, the history of a social
Obligation, sexual exercise for sport.
Out the tent-flap door
One sees the piercing blued
Stretch of a lake obtrude.
An envoi reports ‘the way
Is mere wavering,’ unmark’d, and
Apt to sully souls used
To hours of senseless hammering.
* * *GAP AND ERASURE
The lumbering bumblebee is out
Buttering up its bronze thighs
With pollen’d orbs of echinacea.
It’s a period piece, a
Gap in the goldenrod, dud
Erasure against vetch-trifled embankments,
Hap what hap might. Toot
A coup I got ‘promptitude
O’ the toong’ and I
‘Misewell’ make something of it.
Madder ’n a mad hen
Is how I been lately—
One summery day a redhead
Hopped off a blue bicycle,
Order’d a scoop of mocha-
Chip. Her razor smile. Period.
* * *ZONE
That final lassitude. Oh shepherdess.
Fed up with Greek antiquity,
Drowsy and remiss. The ample
Sky fills up with thousands
Of soot-daub’d swifts circumnavigating
Fiery smokestacks. ‘To God, to
God’ the chittering goes: hungry
Men bang incinerators open one
By one. ‘What falshede is
In mariage’ means the sign
Is hanging off the door.
So the dare, the haughty
Zone, th’unpresuming shrug. So th’immense
Defiant pity for what one
Cannot say. Moon is not
Moon, moon is sawn bone.
