A tycoon of poetry for more than fifty years, Anne Waldman has written a new book that searches out the value of the imagination amidst imminent global catastrophe and ultimately teaches readers to work, build something of human value, as our world collapses. 

Kevin McNamee-Tweed has found a way of layering pictures into fields of stray epiphanies, acute visual jokes, doubtings of art and self, and ego-releases—and all this on ceramic slabs that bear an obsession with line and color and that rest in the hands like a book.

If criticism is praise, measure, and the drawing out of what the work and the life of an artist might mean for others, then Ron Padgett’s new book about Dick Gallup, who Anne Waldman called the “secret hero of the second generation New York School,” is among the most perceptive and rewarding in the game.

No Land and Anne Waldman “met on the street” and “exchanged a flower” on May Day 2012, and so opens The Velvet Wire. The Velvet Wire reads like a sort of shrine to their friendship, a holy collage of lines from each other’s work, nightly notes, and poems made together and for one another, often painted on, and printed for the reader to witness.