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 scholar, teacher, poet, artist and disseminator of Tibetan Buddhism to the West. In 2004, Tischer settled in Tepoztlan, Mexico … [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 a whim, at my local indie, natch, and glad I am that I did. Bad Baby is, quite simply, a knockout: a potent but light-footed … [Read more...]
Book Review — Wait Til I’m Dead: Uncollected Poems by Allen Ginsberg
Wait Till I'm Dead: Uncollected Poems by Allen Ginsberg (Bill Morgan, ed.) / Grove Press / hardcover When I first heard about this book of uncollected poems by Allen Ginsberg, I imagined a slim volume of "b-sides" that would be "for the completist" as my cinephile friend describes the lesser, flawed films of his favorite directors. To my surprise, it was more … [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 stranger. As the people and places within them naturally become mythologised over time, but never watered down. It's a world … [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 annually visit the place for the sake of the probable catastrophe.” This cliché presents a challenge. An author who writes … [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 into the store. They did what you do in a bookstore: talked about books, with Harris recommending something he was … [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 Molly Bloom’s day in James Joyce’s classic Ulysses or the week of contemporary romance in Rainbow Rowell’s novel Landline, the … [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 never been an equal opportunity employer. African-Americans were shut out from the big leagues for decades. Gay Americans … [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 in a stare with an opossum, the arm swing of a rollerblader, or the gentle observation of an elder's sweet kiss, Kooser's … [Read more...]
Book Review – The Last First Day: A Novel
The Last First Day: A Novel by Carrie Brown / Pantheon / 304 pages / 978-0307908032 Carrie Brown’s prose sucks you into a kind of lull. Images of rooms without bodies, twilights in small towns, or people caught in states of pause and repose are palpable in quiet fluidity. You feel transported to a safe place, as though fear has been exiled, excluded, forgotten. The … [Read more...]
The Curse of the Blinding Worm. A close look at ‘Observed While Falling: Bill Burroughs, Ah Pook and Me’, by Malcolm McNeill
Colin Wilson read this extraordinary book at a single sitting. He can’t have been an exception. Malcolm McNeill’s Observed While Falling: Bill Burroughs, Ah Pook and Me sweeps you up into a multi-layered adventure that presses almost every button: it’s philosophy; it’s science fiction and it’s science fact. It plays astonishing tricks with reality. It’s a wild phantasmagoria … [Read more...]
A Review of Joseph Ridgwell’s Cuba: In Search of Hemingway
Turning the first page on the handsewn binding of Joseph Ridgwell’s Cuba: In Search of Hemingway feels like something special. Like discovering the splintered edges of a treasure chest through sand. Or something you might unexpectedly luck on at the bottom of a box of Cuban cigars, holding it up and being wondrously captivated by it. But that’s all part of the charm. Like other … [Read more...]
Book Review – Alex Preston’s In Love and War.
In Love and War is the third novel from Alex Preston, following 2010's This Bleeding City – which won The Edinburgh International Book Festival Readers’ First Book Award, and was chosen as one of Waterstones’ New Voices of 2010 – and its follow-up, The Revelations, which was released in 2012 to much critical acclaim. The novel follows Esmond Lowndes on a journey from an … [Read more...]
Book Review – Vacant Lot by Oliver Rohe (trans. Laird Hunt)
Vacant Lot by Oliver Rohe, translated by Laird Hunt. Counterpath Press, 2011. “Then I was king and now I’m no more than a ghost,” says the narrator in Oliver Rohe’s novel Vacant Lot. Now “I pass haggardly through trenches at the periphery of agitation and take refuge in a penumbra that is menaced from all sides.” Translated from the French by novelist Laird Hunt, at its … [Read more...]
Book Review: Henry Miller: Ahead of the Game by Kenton Crowther
Kenton Crowther's 3100-word essay, Henry Miller: Ahead of the Game has just become available in digital form. In it, Crowther shines a little light on Miller as a writer and as a man, exploring his life, sensibilities, and ongoing relevance. It's not an in-depth look at Miller, but certainly an entertaining and thoughtful one. First, Crowther takes a look at Miller's … [Read more...]
“The Invention of the Past”: An essay on the novel Ancient Light by John Banville
When fifteen-year-old Alexander Cleave first catches sight of Mrs. Gray – the mother of his best friend – what he sees is a reflection of a reflection. As he waits in the hallway of her house, he sees her naked, “not nude”, in the full-length mirror fixed to the outside of her bedroom door. It is only a reflection of her image caught in the mirrors of the three-paneled dressing … [Read more...]
Paul Maher Jr. considers Kerouac’s Haunted Life
The Haunted Life and Other Writings / Da Capo Press / March 11, 2014 / 208 pp. Seventy years ago, in May 1944, Jack Kerouac toiled over a novella-length work set in Lowell, Massachusetts. It was written at the prompting of his two newest friends, the mischievous nihilist Lucien Carr and the budding poet, Allen Ginsberg. He titled it The Haunted Life and it was never … [Read more...]
Book review – The Book of Duels by Michael Garriga
The Book of Duels by Michael Garriga / Milkweed / 2014 / ISBN: 9781571310934 Code Duello; or, How an Author Teaches You to Die, Rise, and be Born Again He greets you with a sly smile and a twinkle of the eyes that suggests mischief, leans into you like a conspirator while shuffling you toward a scarlet cooler in the middle of the room, and whispers, “Grab a beer. … [Read more...]
Kerouac Before the Jazz: a review of “The Haunted Life”
There are some great lost manuscripts in American literature and some are truly lost. Ernest Hemingway famously lost the only draft of the first short stories he ever wrote on a French train. Most writers have "lost" manuscripts, conspicuously placed in quotes because those stories for whatever reason the writer has are socked away until after their deaths (interestingly, … [Read more...]
The Novel as History: An essay on the book Homer and Langley by E.L. Doctorow
The novel Homer and Langley is part history and part fiction: a distinction without a difference within its pages. Doctorow has gained a reputation for taking considerable liberties with recorded history, for frequently transgressing the boundaries between fact and fiction. For him, all purely historical explanations of the past have proved inadequate, as they do not account … [Read more...]
Book Review – IR 30: Indigenous Visions In Dub
I guess it's appropriate that blockades have gone up again on the Tyndengia Mohawk reservation in South Eastern Ontario Canada as I begin to write this review. Here in Canada the First Nations people are usually out of sight and out of mind unless they manage to capture the media's attention with some event which inconvenience the population at large. While the fact that the … [Read more...]
The Opening Line – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold." And so begins the first sentence to Hunter S. Thompson's seminal 1971 book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, a book, which give or take a few missed opportunities, I have endeavoured to read once a year since first picking it up … [Read more...]
beyond the ghosts: poems by t. kilgore splake
beyond the ghosts: poems by t. kilgore splake / Presa Press / PO Box 792, Rockford MI 49341 / 35 pages / $6.00 The author provided a copy to Empty Mirror, with no expectation of review. t. kilgore splake knows how to draw an evocative picture with just a few strokes of his pen, each line shimmers and is necessary. beyond the ghosts's poems look at people and the wild … [Read more...]
Book Review – Dreams before Extinction by Naeemeh Naeemaei
It's hard for us in the West not to have misconceptions of what life is like in countries where our perceptions are shaped entirely by what we read in the media. This is especially true of those countries which have attempted to isolate themselves and their populace from what they consider our corrupting influence. I have to admit I have my own prejudices when it comes to Iran. … [Read more...]
Book Review – The Silence Before the Whisper Comes by Bruce Kauffman
Why would anyone write poetry? It's not what you'd call glamourous. You're never going to make money at it. The best you can hope for is if you manage to publish a few books of poems you could possibly get picked up by some university to teach a creative writing class or get some work editing for literary magazines. The best poets I've known or read have jobs working in book … [Read more...]
Opacity: Liminal Landmine-Bodies – the foreword to Liberty Limited by Károly Sándor Pallai
Liberty Limited by Károly Sándor Pallai / Éditions Arthée / 2013 / ISBN: 9789993184638 One of my most despondent memories relates to my first encounter with “Mother Country” France, where it was distressingly tacit that I am “other” than French, that I am fundamentally an islander from Guadeloupe, a French woman sure, but from overseas, from – “over there”. Yes, from … [Read more...]
Book Review — Grand Marais by t. kilgore splake
Grand Marais by t. kilgore splake / paperback, with DVD / 978-1-4675-8222-3 t. kilgore splake's latest volume is a poetic and photographic celebration of Grand Marais, Minnesota, a small city on the shore of Lake Superior. splake's roots go deep in the Grand Marais area. It's where, aside a campfire years ago, he wrote his first poem. It's here that his pen name was … [Read more...]
Hammond Guthrie’s AsEverWas: Memoirs of a Beat Survivor
AsEverWas: Memoirs of a Beat Survivor by Hammond Guthrie / 2nd edition / Jorvik Press / 978-0988412231 / paperback, 296 pages The publisher provided Empty Mirror with a review copy. When the counterculture was busy being born in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the mid-1960s, Hammond Guthrie found himself in the midst of hipster heaven, somewhere between late Beat and … [Read more...]
Book Review: Alice In tumblr-Land (And Other Fairy Tales For A New Generation)
Alice In tumblr-Land (And Other Fairy Tales For A New Generation) by Tim Manley / Penguin Books / 2013 / 978-0143124795 / 272 pages "Curiouser and curiouser" was Alice's commentary on the world she found down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carol's Alice In Wonderland. While the land she found herself in was populated by hookah smoking caterpillars, pocket watch bearing white … [Read more...]
Book Review – T.C. Boyle Stories II
Stories II by T.C. Boyle / Viking / Penguin Group / 2013 / 978-0670026258 / 944 pages In some form or another the short story has probably been around as long as man has had the desire and the ability to communicate. Oral tales told around the fire at night aren't going to be long drawn out affairs. Neither are they going to deal with more than one subject. While they might … [Read more...]
Review – Let’s Start a Pussy Riot
Let's Start a Pussy Riot, edited by Emely Neu and Jade French / Rough Trade / June 2013 / 978-0957626201 On February 21, 2012 members of the Russian feminist performance art group/collective Pussy Riot put on an agit-prop performance in a priests only section of Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Accused of religious hatred, two of the members of the group, Maria … [Read more...]
Book Review – What Poets Are Like: Up and Down with the Writing Life by Gary Soto
What Poets Are Like: Up and Down with the Writing Life / Gary Soto / Sasquatch Books / 978-1570618741 / 208 pages What Poets Are Like: Up and Down with the Writing Life collects sixty short essays by Gary Soto. Soto is an acclaimed American poet, as well as the author of many books for young readers. This isn't an instruction book for writing poetry, or a memoir. You … [Read more...]
Book Review – How Hip Was My Alley by Kenton Crowther
[Editor's note: 5/21/2014: How Hip Was My Alley has been re-titled Dad, the Times We Had: Baby Boomers in Paradise.] Kenton Crowther's previous volume, Alleycats and Beatsters, collected the author's writings built on the Beat Generation and the essence of "hip." This time out, he casts a wider net; How Hip Was My Alley gathers over three dozen pieces on a wide variety of … [Read more...]
Book Review – Son of Kerouac, Woodstock and God: A Memoir by James Crockett
Son of Kerouac, Woodstock and God / James Crockett / 978-148125581 / 261 pages Empty Mirror received a review copy of this book. As a young man about to embark upon a summer-long hitchhiking trip through the western United States in the mid-1970s, James Crockett was given a second-hand copy of Jack Kerouac's autobiographical novel, On the Road - and later, Kerouac books … [Read more...]
splake’s Magic Box
splake fishing in america. Rockford: Presa Press, 2013 only in my dreams. Springfield: Gage, 2012. Beyond Campfire Ashes. Battle Creeek: Gage, 2012. Backwater Bard Loft Musings. Fort Wayne: The Moon, 2009. Le Metrop 2012. Ed Gray dir. (dvd). Poet Bryn Fortey said it best: “When splake sends, he really sends.” Once, both of us received woolly hats from the … [Read more...]
Book Review – Tripping with Allah by Michael Muhammad Knight
Tripping with Allah: Islam, Drugs, and Writing by Michael Muhammad Knight Soft Skull Press / 978-1593764432 / 256 pages The idea of using drugs in order to achieve some sort of spiritual enlightenment has been around for probably as long as humanity. Whether looking for answers to great mystical questions or just on a personal quest for enlightenment the use of external … [Read more...]
Book Review: Laura Madeline Wiseman’s poetry collection, SPRUNG
SPRUNG by Laura Madeline Wiseman / San Francisco Bay Press, 259 Granby St. Suite 200, Norfolk, VA 23517 / 2012 / 100 pages / 978-0982829578 There's fun in these irreverent poems, but also a serious look at gender and sexuality. What has sprung in this debut full-length collection (though Wiseman has published many chapbooks) is an imaginary penis that follows the voiced … [Read more...]
Book Review – What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Carver
Raymond Carver's classic short story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, was originally published in 1981 and has been the subject of some controversy over the years, with questions raised about the importance of editor Gordon Lish's role in establishing the unique minimalist style that pervades each story. Such questions of authorship vs. editorship have … [Read more...]
Book Review – The Beauty of being Hated by Jack Leaf Willetts
Empty Mirror received a review copy of this book. Many of the poems in Jack Willetts' debut poetry collection, The Beauty of being Hated, explore the way we label and think about feelings. Here are the pain and hope that spring, intertwined, from the aftermath of failed relationships and beginnings of new ones, and what lies between. Not all emotions are pure: lines blur, … [Read more...]
Poetry Review – Waterloo, by J.T. Welsch
Waterloo by J.T. Welsch / Like This Press / Saddle-Stitch, 36 pages The twenty-four numbered but untitled poems, and almost as many monochrome images, of J.T. Welsch’s Waterloo begin with a wake. The first poem quickly makes clear that though a death may have served as the impetus for this series, the poems will not really be about grief: “Between the storm and jetlag, the … [Read more...]
