Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs by Laura Hyunjhee Kim / Civil Coping Mechanisms / Paperback / 100 pages / 978-1948700184 / June 17, 2019 Laura Hyunjhee Kim’s Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs is a book of speculative theory. The book explores the ambiguous and fluid qualities of the blob, shaping the primordial ooze of a quickly expanding field: … [Read more...]
Explorations in Form: Three Small Press Releases
It’s the goal of small presses such as Inside the Castle, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Schism, and others like them to publish unconventional forms of literature, those in the expanded field --- whatever that might entail. Book-objects that play with what literature is capable of, what it can do or contain. Here, I want to explore three recent projects which each use atypical … [Read more...]
Allen Ginsberg’s Iron Curtain Journals, reviewed by Marc Olmsted
Iron Curtain Journals (January-May 1965) by Allen Ginsberg, edited by Michael Schumacher / University of Minnesota Press / Iron Curtain Journals covers a particularly interesting slice of time in Allen Ginsberg's writing, Jan.-May 1965, anticipated by 1961's "Prose Contribution to the Cuban Revolution," and bracketing the creation of the major poems "Kral Majales" and … [Read more...]
Constant Stranger: After Frank Stanford, reviewed by Jared Benjamin
Constant Stranger: After Frank Stanford, edited by Max Crinnin & Aidan Ryan / Foundlings Press / 2018. In the early 1970s, a poet from the Mississippi heartland, expatriated to the Ozark scenery of Arkansas, would help shape the world of contemporary poetry. A poet who wasn’t afraid to shed his smile like snakeskin and open a frown instead. A poet whose themes weren’t afraid … [Read more...]
Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer, reviewed by Beth Spencer
Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer / Random House / 320 pages / 9780812995701 / Jan 29, 2019 Stop the presses! Stop submitting to them, that is, until you’ve taken a look at Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, which comes out at the end of January this year. Chances are good that if you’re bothering … [Read more...]
The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way: On Writers and Writing by Charles Bukowski
The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way: On Writers and Writing by Charles Bukowski. Edited by David Stephen Calonne / City Lights Books / 978-0-87286-759-8 / 2018 I kind of don't know how they keep coming, but Charles Bukowski was such a prolific writer, and perhaps so disorganized, that posthumous collections of both prose and poetry continue to trickle out, 24 years … [Read more...]
The Buddhist Beat Poetics of Diane di Prima and Lenore Kandel by Max Orsini, reviewed by Marc Olmsted
The Buddhist Beat Poetics of Diane di Prima and Lenore Kandel by Max Orsini / Beatdom Books / 224 pages / July 2018 / 978-0993409950 Within the all-pervasive expanse of the sky of great emptiness, without center or circumference, The shadowless sun of luminosity naturally arises, without emanating or dissolving, Thus the dense darkness of innate and conceptual ignorance … [Read more...]
Florilegium: Palestinian Walks
Palestinian Walks by Raja Shehadeh / Scribner (Simon and Schuster) / 2007 / 978-1416569664 Imagine the home you love despoiled by conquerors, who insist they are claiming only what is owed them. Imagine your freedom even to walk outdoors curtailed. Imagine the most powerful countries in the world refused to believe your experience, or blamed you for it when you dared … [Read more...]
Luxury and Modernism: Architecture and the Object in Germany 1900-1933
Luxury and Modernism: Architecture and the Object in Germany 1900-1933 by Robin Schuldenfrei / Princeton University Press / 2018 / 978-0691175126 / 338 pages with 74 color and 126 black and white illustrations. In this study showcasing the paradoxes --- hypocrisies even --- of some of German Modernism’s most illustrious utopian architects and object-makers, Robin … [Read more...]
Experiments in the Function of Language: Reading Laura Riding’s Experts Are Puzzled
Experts Are Puzzled by Laura Riding / Ugly Duckling Presse / 978-1937027865 / May 1, 2018 / 144 pages Laura Riding’s Experts Are Puzzled is a difficult book to classify. At times it looks like a collection of short stories or parables, at other times it looks like a series of philosophical observations. Regardless of this ambiguity, Experts Are Puzzled is a clear and … [Read more...]
Nona Caspers’ The Fifth Woman, reviewed by Noah Sanders
The Fifth Woman by Nona Caspers / Sarabande Books / 160 pages / 978-1946448170 / August 14, 2018 The death central to Nona Casper’s incredible new book, The Fifth Woman (Sarabande Books), happens within pages of the book starting. Michelle, the live-in girlfriend of the book’s unnamed narrator, is hit by a car while riding her bike to work and dies in the ambulance on the … [Read more...]
Nothing Good Can Come from This by Kristi Coulter, reviewed by Noah Sanders
Nothing Good Can Come from This by Kristi Coulter / MCD x FSG Originals / 978-0374286200 / 224 pg. / August 7, 2018 The best of addiction memoirs brings a sense of guilt with it. You read a well-penned piece about someone's struggle with alcohol and then you slink away to your question and stare shamefully at your cold glass of 4:00pm wine. You dog-ear a page and then try to … [Read more...]
Echo Bay: Poems by Jennifer Battisti, reviewed by Emily Hoover
Echo Bay: Poems by Jennifer Battisti / Tolsun Books / 9781948800013 / 2018 / paperback; 42 pp. Jennifer Battisti’s chapbook of poems, Echo Bay, has its roots in the sand and rock of Las Vegas. Battisti studied creative writing at the College of Southern Nevada, currently works with the Las Vegas Poets Organization, and has published with several area journals and … [Read more...]
Translating the Counterculture: The Reception of the Beats in Turkey by Erik Mortenson, reviewed by Marc Olmsted
TRANSLATING THE COUNTERCULTURE The Reception of the Beats in Turkey by Erik Mortenson / Southern Illinois University Press / 978-0809336548 / 2018 The premise is a fascinating one. Erik Mortenson actually was IN Turkey during its attempted coup in 2016 and had to leave with his family. He taught at the Koç University in Istanbul, so this is no thesis conducted from afar. … [Read more...]
Eileen R. Tabios’ Manhattan: An Archaeology reviewed by Neil Leadbeater
Manhattan: An Archaeology by Eileen R. Tabios / Paloma Press / ISBN: 978-1-365-87509-0 / 2017 Manhattan, probably from the Lenape language word Mannahatta, meaning "island of many hills," is the most densely populated borough of New York City, its economic and administrative center, and its historical birthplace. Locally it is often referred to simply as The City. However, … [Read more...]
A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley, reviewed by Michael Welch
A Lucky Man by Graywolf Press / 978-1555978051 / hardcover / May 1, 2018 In his debut short story collection, A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley traces the arch of fractured masculinity through the lives of nine black men, ranging from the precipice of puberty to the dimming lights of youth. At first glance, Brinkley’s characters appear to stand and stumble as they try to attain … [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 technological advancement confusion takes its place upon the throne of human reason. In such a society, to believe in a linear … [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 writing. Historically, these books blend memoir and how-to into quick, comprehensive, and illustrious reads, most famously … [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 way, Robert Lowell (1917-1977), widely acclaimed in his lifetime as the curator of his mania and thus its commander, seems a … [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, dissectors, obsesionados. Her interest is prefixes; how “beginning” functions as an introduction to meaning from a word’s initial … [Read more...]
Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan, reviewed by Eric D. Lehman
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 is a magic portal. “Around five o’clock in the afternoon of my cover for Trout Fishing in America, people gather in the park … [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, which has the natural speech of the street as well as his own intelligence nailed down to the point that we hear him talking … [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 considered myself fortunate to stroll beside prodigious architects of the written word, to pick their brains from time to time on … [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 explain how America could reach such dire straits—politically, racially, environmentally. In response, many writers have offered … [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 unspeakable, that to put a name to their collective experience undoubtedly required a new word. Thus we get the title of … [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 years — what could there possibly be left to say? Because I didn’t understand it, I was intrigued by it — a mechanism that … [Read more...]
Book Review — First Thought: Conversations with Allen Ginsberg
First Thought: Conversations with Allen Ginsberg edited by Michael Schumacher / University of Minnesota Press / March 17, 2017 / 978-0816699179 Michael Schumacher is one of the major scholars of Allen Ginsberg, and has thus far written the best biography of him, Dharma Lion. First Thought, Michael Schumacher's collection of Allen Ginsberg interviews, is an excellent … [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? We are Pac-Men and Pac-Women gobbling up everything hoping to eat enough pellets and find the special pellet (lover, song, … [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 years and presents us with this; a doorstop wedge of a tome which intimidates with its physicality before the reader has even … [Read more...]
Heroin Haikus by William Wantling, reviewed
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 features a biographical sketch of the poet. From 1958 to 1963, Wantling was incarcerated at San Quentin, the consequence of a … [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 the page. This is poetry you can taste, and touch: poetry as incandescence of the ordinary world, a transformation of … [Read more...]
Paul McCartney: The Biography by Philip Norman – Book Review
Paul McCartney: The Life (US) by Philip Norman / Little, Brown and Company / 2016 / 978-0316327961 Paul McCartney: The Biography (UK) / Weidenfeld & Nicolson / 2016 / 978-0297870760 Soufflé-speak. I don’t know if Philip Norman coined that expression himself, but it crops up countless times in his latest book, Paul McCartney: The Biography. It refers to Paul McCartney’s … [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 the cold. Or you run and dive and before you know it there's seaweed in your hair and your mouth is full of salt. You're in … [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 punches as it hurtles by in bare-knuckle women-and-wine confessional mode before departing along its own warped trajectory, … [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. As more people find out what UK author Steve Aylett is all about, loyal cult following may yet explode into full-fledged … [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 relatively new Christian Era of sixth-century Rome was, literally, happening “just now” outside Cassiodorus’ window. To him, … [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 Toronto, Paul Dutton has had a long career working on the borderlands of sound poetry, live performance, and aural collaboration, … [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 closer look. It is a beautifully written but harsh examination of the ways in which we create meaning for ourselves in 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 a litmus test for growing up. When I read this masterpiece as a teen, I thought Holden Caulfield was the coolest kid ever … [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 passion for the subject had waned. But the majority of the earlier books quickly became shadows, mere echoes of Zen in the Art of … [Read more...]
