Three Coach House titles on Carmine Starnino's 'Best of 2011' List

At the end of 2011, poet and poetry critic Carmine Starnino made his list of the best poetry books of 2011 and Coach House was both surprised and thrilled to find three of our publications on the list.

From Carmine Starnino's Vehicule Press blog:

Lil’ Bastard by David McGimpsey (Coach House)
A great deal of the myth that McGimpsey's poems live in a hostile environment can be traced to an early review collected in my critical book, A Lover's Quarrel. I'm happy to serve as the villain in this morality play, if only because it helps make my moments of praise more noteworthy. McGimpsey's new book of "chubby sonnets" underscores the fact that when his high risk, high-caloric poetry works -- as it did in Sitcom, and does again here -- the results are marvellous, provocative and original.

A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People by Gabe Foreman (Coach House)
I was utterly defeated by parts of this book. But in my bafflement, there was always something -- a funny bit, a crisp image, an apt metaphor -- I could pocket. Foreman's absurdist, anti-prose-sense "personality profiles" are events in themselves, and I found myself gladly tacking to all the linguistic shifts in his shaggy-dog-storytelling.

Hypotheticals by Leigh Kotsilidis (Coach House)
A promising debut. Unquenchably attracted to the sound of scientific sense, Kotsilidis is wickedly good at using line-breaks and stanza shapes -- often short, tense couplets -- to locate unexpected pressure-points in her well-timed sentences. The collection is studded with terrific turns of phrase.

See the full list of Carmine Starnino's top ten on the Vehicule Press blog.