On Scatterplot:
David Koehn’s Scatterplot is a book full of names and near-misses best described by its attention to narrative…when it is the narrative we associate with dreams! Or as Koehn himself says, “I was stumbling around the aisles of a dream.” This line in particular has everything to do with what I love most about this book. Every poem throws itself headlong into litanies of images reminding us that, even when we are lost or dying or anxious, we are still very much alive.
Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition and winner of the Pulitzer Prize
From its first line this book announces itself in sinuous rhythms of sound. Koehn’s sound is contemporary but his tricks ring with ancient echo–apophatic exuberance resonates against aniconic description and coy anacoenotic inquiry. Still, it’s no dusty fairy tale, nor rangy arrangement–it’s here and now, immediate and incisive.
—Kazim Ali, author of Inquisition
David Koehn’s playful new book of poems, Scatterplot, intertwines the personal and the political, the past and the present. When Koehn writes, I am what happens before the artist covers the canvas in paint, he means it. His intimate, fine-grained attention to vivid details, as well as his energized lyrical juxtapositions, are restless yet fluid, which is to say, they are a pleasure to read.
— Sholeh Wolpé, author of Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths
Good poems always know more than their poets, and David Koehn’s poems in Scatterplot are very, very good—as the book progresses, they illuminate their expansive knowing in increasingly fabulous ways. One poem names its four target readers—Bay, Rusty, Scott—and then lists us, the reader, as its fourth. A poem erases itself as we read, another implores us to cut its pages into confetti. A long poem asks, “Can every line carry the whole tune?” and then proceeds to investigate. It’s a wild ride. Koehn has made something irreducible here, electrifyingly new.
— Kaveh Akbar, author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf
On Twine:
From Da Capo al Coda By Judith Kitchen In the Georgia Review
“David Koehn’s Twine, selected by Jeff Friedman, won the May Sarton Poetry Prize, and Bauhan Publishing has done a beautiful production which highlights the more formal poems in the collection. Sestina, villanelle, sonnet, terza rima—Koehn has mastered them all, and then he’s concocted unique variations that provide a charge of energy. It’s almost as if he had taken a guide to poetic terms and experimented with every entry. He also finds ways to incorporate words that my poor dictionary has held its tongue over. “Camphorous,” “mycelium,” “globuliformis,” “hemimetabolous,” “scuppernong,” “thalassic,” “mirroneurons,” “pantagruelists,” “dithyrambic”: these spicy tongue-twisters add vim and vigor as they force the reader to “Jam / tongue into syllables.” There is no doubt in my mind that Koehn could take on any poetic task—anyone who employs the backward rhyme of “risen” and “resin” has my admiration—so my only question is . . . what is his underlying question?
It’s abundantly clear that David Koehn is fascinated by scientific phenomena. In addition, he loves detail: stanzas filled with movie lore, including names, dates, every other kind of specific; lines full of statistics; a plethora of things such as Red Man tobacco, Royal Crown Cola, hula-hoops, cisterns, raspberries, mannequins, mayflies, the Delta flight from Cincinnati. A glance at some of the titles—“The Taxi Driver,” “Swimming Laps at High Altitude,” “The Attempted Assassination of Jules Verne,” “The Graffiti Artist Settles in the Eskimo Village,” “Shopping at Williams-Sonoma,” and “Communications in Accordance with Article 5, Paragraph 1 of the Agreement on the Rescue of Astronauts, the Return of Astronauts, and the Return of Objects Launched into Outer Space Partial Pantoum”—shows such a wide range of subject matter that diversity itself seems to be the glue holding the book together. The contemporary “ringtone” is as endangered as the nearly-extinct lunch tins, clothespin bags, and VHF antennae. Often a moment is “defined by what it is not.” We are forced to look at each poem individually; each plays out on its own terms, and so often the terms are illuminated—and complicated—by invention.