Last week, Robert Pinsky’s Poet’s Choice column in the Washington Post featured Charles Bernstein’s latest book, Girly Man. As Pinsky notes, much of the work in Girly Man is a meditation on the medium of language itself, an approach to poetry that makes for a refreshing departure from rhetorical convention. Pinsky writes:

Charles Bernstein writes both prose and poetry about poetry, sometimes brilliantly, in ways calculated to upset the middlebrow and thwart the bland. The more you like the poetic equivalent of a nice tune, easy to hum, the more Bernstein means to disrupt your complacency.

We have been delighted to publish several of Bernstein’s books and his latest, Girly Man, is another provocative and aesthetically challenging collection of verse from one of America’s most innovative poets.
We are also always delighted to have another opportunity—though the month of April is barely visible on the frozen horizon— to refer readers to Bernstein’s equally provocative essay, "Against National Poetry Month As Such."