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Kevin Killian is an inveterate and unapologetic collaborator: even when writing solo, there's always another presence. Whether he ventriloquizes through this other, or assimilates or deconstructs it is the reader's call, and it's a difficult one to make. The poems in Killian's most recent book of poetry, Action Kylie (In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni, 128 pages, $15) are places where T.S. Eliot's cats LOL, Antonio Banderas anagrams to "no brains on a date," and Kylie Minogue's derivativeness is more compelling than genius. Read more »

Maybe it's the urge to purge months of presidential campaign propaganda or eight years of George W. Bush. Maybe it's the holiday season. All I know is this: barf is in. The evidence is all around us. On TV, you'll find Hurl, "an eating competition with an extreme sports chaser" that couples tunnel rides in steel balls with mac 'n' cheese gorge-fests in an attempt to make contestants vomit. Read more »

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REVIEW I'll remain calm while reviewing Bernadette Mayer's new collection of poems, Poetry State Forest (New Directions, 128 pages, $17.95). It's sort of a B-sides-and-rarities collection. I first heard "Easy Puddings" through a recording of a reading-interview Mayer gave with Susan Howe on KPFA-FM in the 1970s. While not all of the poems are new, all of them might be new to you.

This dense forest is, first and foremost, public property. Read more »

History is written on the skin. For proof, look no further than Russian Criminal Tattoo Encylopaedia Volume III (Fuel, 400 pages, $32.95), the final chapter in Danzig Baldaev's epic, KGB-approved, ethnographic study. Alexander Sidorov's excellent introduction traces the travels of tattoos from sailors to criminals. Then begins the parade of harshly imaginatively iconography (via Baldaev's drawings) and grave faces (within Sergei Vasiliev's photos). Read more »

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REVIEW The struggle of young, white activists aspiring to the authenticity, confrontational stance, and street credibility of groups like the Black Panthers has generated some of the most enduring myths and storylines of the 1960s. Read more »

ISBN REAL America has just ended its quadrennial psychoanalysis of every state in the union, ultimately prescribing a mood enhancer. I'm glad that appointment is over, of course.

But I have to say I'm gonna miss watching the candidates participate in their grueling dance marathon with vain, neurotic America, a contest that involved gliding from state to state at breakneck speeds in a perversion of the open-road mythology. I'm gonna miss those blow-up maps of the nation, so detailed that CNN will have to team up with Google Earth to outyell the competition again in 2012. Read more »

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REVIEW If you're one of the 200,000 San Franciscans who voted for Barack Obama, maybe you're staring at that map of red and blue states wondering, "How could 56 million people vote for John McCain? Why is there still this incredible swath of crimson belting our country?"

Similar questions have been burning in the minds of liberals since the 2000 election. Read more »

Bill Berkson's poetry is a tortoise-and-hare countryside — no one's watching the clock, although it's lunchtime in early fall. When you read his poems, you say, "They're doing it for me, I'll do it for them." His life in art (first as a self-described "kid on the scene of the first New York School," later as a sleeper cell in the New York–Bolinas "axis of poetry evil") could be signified by a freshly minted tarot card: Collaboration. Read more »

Call him the monkish punk elder of counterculture in the Bay and fringes wherever they may fray. Behind a monochromatic, black-clad, black-banged façade and unassuming demeanor, V. Vale is a man of so many interests and accomplishments that it's hard to know where to start. How about with Vale as Punk Showman?

"In 1984 I'm sure I put on one of the greatest shows ever to celebrate our J.G. Ballard book," the 50-plus publisher says. Read more »

The first book I held close to my heart was Italian poet Antonio Porta's 1987 Kisses from Another Dream, number 44 in the ongoing City Lights Pocket Poets Series. I bought it on a trip to the city from Santa Cruz when I was around 17, and I savored every line, whipping out the book at coffee shops and other high school hangouts, in attics late at night, at beach bonfires, and even for a speech at one friend's funeral. Read more »