Books
The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century. Eds. William Allegrezza and Ray Bianchi.
Michelle Noteboom's Edging.
 The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century. Eds. William Allegrezza and Raymond Bianchi. 2007. ISBN 0-9786440-1-8 and ISBN-13 978-0-9786440-1-7. $22.95.
This anthology brings together a sampling of some of the best poets working in Chicago and the surrounding region. From all corners of the city, these poets are crafting a voice for Chicago literature in the new century.
The book contains work from the following poets:
Jennifer Scappettone * Suzanne Buffam * Srikanth Reddy * Robyn Schiff * Nick Twemlow * John Tipton * Eric Elshtain * David Pavelich * Peter O’Leary * William Fuller * Michael O’Leary * Mark Tardi * Erica Bernheim * Michael Antonucci * Chris Glomski * Garin Cycholl * Luis Urrea * Kristy Odelius * Lina Ramona Vitkauskas * Simone Muench * Lea Graham * Ed Roberson * Arielle Greenberg * Tony Trigilio * Shin Yu Pai * Dan Beachy-Quick * Maxine Chernoff * Kerri Sonnenberg * Jesse Seldess * Paul Hoover * Michelle Taransky * Robert Archambeau * Bill Marsh * Larry Sawyer * Cecilia Pinto * Johanny Vázquez Paz * Ela Kotkowska * Jorge Sanchez * Joel Craig * Daniel Borzutzky * Joel Felix * Raymond Bianchi * Cynthia Bond * William Allegrezza * Jennifer Karmin * Tim Yu * Laura Sims * Roberto Harrison * Brenda Cárdenas * Stacy Szymaszek * Chuck Stebelton.
Praise for The City Visible.
When Carl Sandburg asked in his Chicago Poems, close to a hundred years ago, for "a voice to speak to me in the day end, / A hand to touch me in the dark room / Breaking the long loneliness," little did he know his city would be so fully and livingly answered and so honored. Chicago is again transformed by poetry. Here in these myriad acts of imagination, the poets of The City Visible give to it again, in Shakespeare's terms, :a local habitation and a name."
Peter Gizzi
The most exciting and satisfying anthology I’ve acquired in the past month is The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century . . . It not only is easily the best anthology I’ve ever seen that tried to capture the lively scene of the Second City, but it’s a worthy companion to Stephanie Young’s Bay Poetics, which for my money is the gold standard in contemporary poetry anthologies, especially ones that offer a regional focus.
Ron Silliman
There's a lot of fantastic writing here . . . there s a diversity of expression that makes it a fantastic sourcebook.
Simon DeDeo
The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century is a prudent investment for any reader of contemporary poetry . . . the book is a nice, hearty, earnest sampling of interesting poets.
Olivia Cronk, Bookslut
The City Visible makes a strong case for Chicago's current vitality and emerging prominence within the national poetic community.
Fred Muratori, The Boston Review.
Unveiling an entire new poetic culture may seem like the act of a master magician, but Allegrezza and Bianchi have been on the case a long time and they know what they're doing. Volume Two is said to be in the works, and in the meantime I for one will be ordering several copies of Volume One for students, friends, and family relations. When young poets ask me, where should I go, what should I do, nowadays I always say pull out a map, throw in a dart. X marks the spot, but Chicago is the most exciting scene around. Years from now we'll be looking back at the early 21st century and wishing we'd all relocated there at this time in poetry history. "Zigzag is the mind's progress," as Paul Hoover wrote, *perhaps* in Chicago, "and stabs at every tree" ("Poetics, page 143).
Kevin Killian
Time Out Chicago lists it as one of the 5 best Chicago poetry books.
Michelle Noteboom's Edging. ISBN 0-9786440-0-X. 2006. $12.95.
Formally innovative and playful, drawing on personal experience and research, Michelle Noteboom’s first collection of poems weaves together obsessions about skin and body, desire and violence, science and sensuality. Here, edges are blades as well as boundaries. They are horizons and frontiers between physical and mental territories; frames of what is seen, felt, grasped. Noteboom takes us on a poetic exploration of skin as border between self and the world, of language as limit between self and meaning. This is writing that maps and migrates, transgresses and erodes in a constant collage of exchange between the inner and outer realms. While remaining firmly rooted in a real sense of physicality, Edging little by little catapults us into a futuristic outpost "on the outskirts of something", where identity blurs and our bodies become “a new kind of language".
Praise for Edging.
We're all insiders when it comes to the skin. Michelle Noteboom's Edging wants to turn that inside out. This is skin as the material of ever-changing identity. The vibrations, pressure points, scrubbing and shedding-- various, curious, tragic, sensual, and exact. William
Burroughs thought language was a virus, reading Noteboom one suspects it may be a masseuse. Here, in our skin, to "sink into seemingly insurmountable become."
Rod Smith
In this deeply moving first collection, Michelle Noteboom takes a rigorous, relentless, and compassionate look at the body in its most vulnerable moments. Focusing on skin---as a wave in which the body breaks against the world, as a screen on which our most intimate communications are written---she probes human possibility, revealing how it can betray
humanity, but also, how, ultimately, it returns to it.
Cole Swensen
Michelle Noteboom’s poetry traverses boundaries, created and imposed, with a fierce inquisitiveness that unearths our constant physical and psychological vulnerability in spite of, but also because of, our agency in the marking and manipulation of the human form. Edging, as both process and object, flirts with that tenuous space between objects, bodies—that shape-shifting realm where one can only “touch it now, then awake.” Noteboom’s poetry holds the ‘surrogate self’ under examination, and the future of the body is suddenly, urgently drawn close. This is a fearless and captivating debut.
E. Tracy Grinnell
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