Mortal Trash: Poems by Kim Addonizio / W. W. Norton / 978-0-393-35434-8 / paperback / August 1, 2017 I've reviewed Kim Addonizio before, for her short story collection The Palace of Illusions (2015). I still think of her as a poet, though she's one … [Read more...]
A Shimmering Blue: a review of Susana H. Case’s Drugstore Blue
Drugstore Blue by Susana H. Case / Five Oaks Press / 2017 / 9781944355340 / 71 pages Susana H. Case is an American original. In poem after poem, book after book, she brings her incisive wit and poetic flair to a variety of landscapes and situations. In … [Read more...]
farnessity by Randee Silv, reviewed by John Greiner
farnessity by Randee Silv / dancing girl press & studio / 2018 Without a doubt we are living in disorientating times and in these disorientating times we are the receptacles of a plethora of information coming from multiple sources. With our … [Read more...]
Book Review – Betwixt-and-Between: Essays On the Writing Life
Betwixt-and-Between: Essays On the Writing Life by Jenny Boully / Coffee House Press / $16.95 / 140 pgs. Jenny Boully’s fifth book, Betwixt and Between: Essays On the Writing Life, does not neatly assimilate into the tradition of writers writing about … [Read more...]
Book Review: Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character
Kay Redfield Jamison. Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character. (New York: Knopf, 2017) 560 pages with extensive clinical footnotes, primary source documents, and passages from Lowell’s oeuvre. In a certain … [Read more...]
PRE- by Barbara Tomash reviewed by Dina Paulson-McEwen
PRE- by Barbara Tomash / Black Radish Books / paperback / 74 pages / ISBN 978-0-9979524-6-9 / 2018 PRE-, the fourth poetry collection from California-based poet Barbara Tomash, will delight (lay) lexicographers and otherwise language lovers, … [Read more...]
12 Points: tenderling by Emily Corwin
tenderling by Emily Corwin / Stalking Horse Press / 2018 / 64pgs. Before diving into the book proper, a point to say that I very much appreciate that Emily Corwin’s debut full-length collection comes in at 64 pages. That’s not because I wanted to … [Read more...]
Homing In: Our Sudden Museum by Robert Fanning, reviewed by Z.G. Tomaszewski
Our Sudden Museum by Robert Fanning / Salmon Poetry / 2017 / 978-1-910669-67-9 / 82 pages In Our Sudden Museum, poet Robert Fanning is no stranger to tragedy. As readers of this collection, we become witness to a landscape deepened with heart-felt … [Read more...]
Holy Ghost by David Brazil, reviewed by Michael Kirby
Holy Ghost by David Brazil / City Lights Books / 9780872867147 / 113 pages / May 2017 Originating with the poststructuralists (Derrida and The Gift of Death being one example), then reaching a sort of apex in Badiou’s Saint Paul, the religious turn in … [Read more...]
Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart, reviewed by Ryan Kim
Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang / Lenny (Random House) / 320 pages / 0399589386 / August 1, 2017 In “My Days and Nights of Terror,” Mande, a Chinese immigrant, is made fun of by Korean classmates for her accent. The self-hatred is both ironic and … [Read more...]
Book Review — Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan
Richard Brautigan’s 1967 novella Trout Fishing in America is a difficult book. The opening chapter, “The Cover for Trout Fishing in America,” immediately puts the reader off balance, with a description of the actual book cover that we enter into, as if it … [Read more...]
Marc Olmsted reviews Dime Bag: Stories 1978–1986 by Vincent Zangrillo
Dime Bag: Stories 1978–1986 by Vincent Zangrillo / Sensitive Skin Press / paperback / 978-1545465004 There are two main differences to Vincent Zangrillo's account, Dime Bag, from the usual down-and-out- drug tale --- first, his "language," his voice, … [Read more...]
Filthy Labors: Poems by Lauren Marie Schmidt, reviewed by Eugene A. Melino
Filthy Labors by Lauren Marie Schmidt / Curbstone Books / ISBN: 978-0810134690 / 104 pages / 2017 I was nursing another cold Peroni at a wobbly table at the Bowery Poetry Club when I first heard Lauren Marie Schmidt read “In Defense of Poetry,” the … [Read more...]
Book Review – The Education of a Young Poet by David Biespiel
The Education of a Young Poet by David Biespiel / Counterpoint / 978-1619029934 / October 10, 2017 In a lot of ways, I have regarded my writing and my reading as being the product of some privilege. It’s not altogether traumatic to admit. I’ve … [Read more...]
Book Review: Great Plains Bison by Dan O’Brien
Great Plains Bison by Dan O'Brien / University of Nebraska Press / 2017 / xiii + 111pp / Despite its variety in form, length, and genre, most writing seeks to explain why. Now, more than ever, we find ourselves searching for answers, yearning to … [Read more...]
Book Review – Enfermario by Gabriela Torres Olivares
Enfermario by Gabriela Torres Olivares, translated by Jennifer Donovan / Les Figues Press / June 2017 / 978-1-934254-65-3 / 144 pages / softcover The level of degradation to which Gabriela Torres Olivares’ characters sink may be so grotesque, daresay … [Read more...]
Shock of the New: Jennifer L. Lieberman, Power Lines, and Science and Technology Studies
When I was young, I found the idea that there were people who in the world who devoted their lives to writing about literature — about Shakespeare, say — both fascinating and mystifying. Readers had been puzzling over these plays for almost four hundred … [Read more...]
“No, this was all first person”: Revisiting Jorie Graham’s Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts
Jorie Graham’s first poetry collection, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980) has a way of receding from memory despite its potency due, in part, to the great success of her second collection. Her career as we know it today began to take shape after … [Read more...]
Giving the Stars Their Right Names: Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith, reviewed
Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith / Graywolf Press / 96 pages / 978-1555977856 / September 5, 2017 Not all poems are written and speak out in defense of something, not many books reach up and over their own identity to inhabit others, “learning to … [Read more...]
Book Review – Universal Harvester by John Darnielle
John Darnielle is already something of a big deal. As frontman and creative driving force for alt-rock cult figures The Mountain Goats, Darnielle has been crafting beguiling pop lyrics for approaching three decades, garnering major praise for the depth … [Read more...]
Book review – Life is Unbearable: Grzegorz Wróblewski’s Zero Visibility
Zero Visibility by Grzegorz Wróblewski (trans. Piotr Gwiazda) / Phoneme Media / 136 pages / ISBN: 978-1944700126 We are constantly swamped with all sorts of products (books, music, movies, the news). Does it make our lives any better or worthwhile? … [Read more...]
Book Review: 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster
4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster / Henry Holt and Co. / 2017 / 880 pages / ISBN: 978-1627794466 It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Paul Auster – a writer known for brevity and concision, at least most of the time – re-emerges with his first novel in seven … [Read more...]
Heroin Haikus by William Wantling
Heroin Haikus by William Wantling / Tangerine Press / 2016 / 20 pages / 978-1-910691-18-2 William Wantling's Heroin Haikus, out of print for fifty years, was recently published in a new edition by London's Tangerine Press. The book's last page … [Read more...]
Book Review – In Whatever Light Left to Us by Jessica Jacobs
In Whatever Light Left To Us by Jessica Jacobs / Sibling Rivalry Press / ISBN: 978-1-943977-19-2 / 44 pages / 2016 Jessica Jacob’s In Whatever Light Left to Us, is a chapbook infused with the sensual world. Bring your fingers to your lips after turning … [Read more...]
Book review: Kara Vernor’s Because I Wanted to Write You a Pop Song
Because I Wanted to Write You a Pop Song by Kara Vernor / Split Lip Press / 75 pages / ISBN: 978-0-9909035-7-4 "… this is what boys did to girls" My dad used to say there were two ways to enter the sea: you walk in slowly, bracing yourself against … [Read more...]
Book Review – Generation Hex: David Noone’s novella, Saint of the City
Saint of the City by David Noone, introduced by Cathi Unsworth / Murder Slim Press / March 2017 Lunging forwards with a series of rapid-fire blows to the gut masquerading as chapters, Saint of the City, the debut novella by David Noone, pulls no … [Read more...]
Steve Aylett is Creative People’s Drug of Choice
The following is a modified version of the first essay in Steve Aylett: A Critical Anthology (Sein und Werden, 2016), in which various authors discuss and analyze the work of Steve Aylett. The anthology is edited by Bill Ectric and D. Harlan Wilson. … [Read more...]
Book review – Modern Once Again: Whit Griffin’s We Who Saw Everything
We Who Saw Everything by Whit Griffin / The Cutural Society / 978-0-988-71926-2 /2015 It’s said that the Roman statesman Cassiodorus was the first writer to regularly use “modern” in the historical sense of the term, which is as much to say that the … [Read more...]
Sonosyntactics by Paul Dutton: A Book Review
Sonosyntactics by Paul Dutton / Wilfrid Laurier University Press / $18.99 / 2015 Sonosyntactics: Selected and New Poetry of Paul Dutton serves as a tidy overview of the work of an unheralded poet of the experimental and the avant-garde. Based in … [Read more...]
Book Review – Swimmer in the Secret Sea by William Kotzwinkle
Known more for fantasy and children’s books, William Kotzwinkle made his name with novelizations of hit movies like E.T: The Extra Terrestrial. His forays into more serious fiction are often ignored, but his novella Swimmer in the Secret Sea deserves a … [Read more...]
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Often, reading books at different times in one’s life produces different results and different interpretations. But perhaps no book makes a clearer demarcation between adolescence and adulthood than J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. This cult classic is … [Read more...]
Book review — Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel
I have read so many books about the practice of Zen Buddhism that it is difficult to choose a particular one that influenced me. And in fact I read Eugen Herrigel’s thin volume after I had read four or five dozen others, and after the moon of my own … [Read more...]
Book Review — Brownian Life by John Tischer
Brownian Life by John Tischer / Bibliotheca Universalis / Bucharest, Romania / 2015 John Tischer was born in Chicago. He graduated from Carleton College in 1971 and was a student of Chögyam Trungpa, a Buddhist meditation master who was also a … [Read more...]
Book Review – Bad Baby by Abigail Welhouse
Bad Baby by Abigail Welhouse / Dancing Girl Press / $7 / 2015 This spiky-funny little book of poems is by a young Brooklyn-based poet named Abigail Welhouse, via a charming Chicago-based chapbook publisher called Dancing Girl Press; I picked it up, on … [Read more...]
Book Review – Joe Ridgwell’s novel, Burrito Deluxe
As a writer, I relish the occasional night of ritualistic storytelling. Nights where it becomes a sport, sat around bars, campfires, or kitchen tables; exchanging stories of where you've been and what you've seen with friends family and the occasional … [Read more...]
Book Review – Stranger Days: A Novel by Rachel Kendall
Hemingway praised Paris as “a movable feast.” Henry James, in his preface to the 1903 edition of The Ambassadors, described a cliché that may or may not be true. He said “the moral scheme breaks down in Paris” and that “hundreds of thousands of…persons … [Read more...]
Erin Messer on Latif Harris’ Barter Within the Bark of Trees
In 1981, the poet Latif Harris was working at — and living above — Browser Books in its former location a block up from the current store on Fillmore Street. Harris was behind the front counter when, he says, “the most beautiful woman in the world” walked … [Read more...]
Book Review – Street Angel by Magie Dominic and Adult Onset by Ann-Marie MacDonald
With chapters named for the days of the week in Street Angel and with specific dates in a given week in Adult Onset, these two novels seem to make ideal reading companions. Ultimately, much of literary fiction is preoccupied with time. Whether it is … [Read more...]
Yankees in Fairyland: A Review of Take Me Out, by Richard Greenberg
Richard Greenberg’s play Take Me Out is as much about the role of the athlete, particularly the baseball “star,” as it is about what makes a team function—and what threatens the unity of a team. The play confronts the disturbing truth that baseball has … [Read more...]
Stars, Salt & Sparrows: A Review of Ted Kooser’s “Splitting An Order”
Splitting An Order by Ted Kooser / Copper Canyon Press / 2014 / 84 pages / 978-1556594694 Overview The light of Ted Kooser is the everyday. To most of us these moments disappear, without recognition, without change, without endurance. Whether caught … [Read more...]