St. Louis Borders

On my way home yesterday from Illinois I stopped at my favorite corporate bookstore- Borders on Brentwood in St. Louis. (I think perhaps the whole area is referred to as Brentwood. It seems to be their version of the Plaza). The store is two storeys & although the space allotted for poetry is rather small, no surprise, it is well stocked with titles from independent presses. The vast majority of books are displayed with the spine facing out, as opposed to other stores where they simply face covers, taking up more space, in categories that they think no one will ever buy. Interesting enough the worst corporate owned bookstore in Kansas City is a Borders location. Their stock of poetry is so small that it's comparable to what one would find in an airport. I have more volumes of poetry laying around my livingroom than their entire poetry stock. The Brentwood branch already had a copy of the new Eshleman anthology "Grindstone of Rapport" pub. by the wonderful Black Widow. I also came across several books I wasn't even aware of- a hardback volume of poetry by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, an anthology of contemporary Hebrew poetry edited by Tsipi Keller, Rosemary Lloyd's biography/study of Baudelaire. I noticed that they'd even restocked the books I'd bought the last time I was there- Nathaniel Tarn's "Embattled Lyric" & Castior's biography of Paz. I am fortunate enough that my second favorite corporate owned bookstore is actually within walking distance of where I live-a three storey Barnes & Noble. Neither of these two stores is on par with a store such as St. Mark's in NY, but they are both nice exceptions to the treatment one usually sees poetry books given in most corporate owned bookstores. Visiting Borders last night actually added an extra forty-five minutes on to an already long drive but it was well worth it. I left with Jose Garcia Villa's "Doveglion" & "The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense" (another book I was unaware of).