Date: March 21, 2023
For all that they are meant to – and do – induce a skin-prickling alarm, the fungal zombies that populate HBO’s “The Last of Us” rely on a stunning optical extravagance that announces them as devices of fantasy. In a bout of poeticism suited to its subject matter, “The Last of Us” has revivified the zombie for fans of […]
Date: March 21, 2023
Playful, kinetic, and devastating in turn, You Were Watching from the Sand (Red Hen Press, 2023) is a collection in which Haitian men, women, and children who find their lives cleaved by the interminably strange bite back at the bizarre with their own oddities.
Date: March 15, 2023
Date: March 15, 2023
Date: March 6, 2023
When adoptees search for their birth parents, it’s the pursuit of identity. Where do I come from? Who gave birth to me? What is my medical history? AYM guest, Jan Beatty, wanted to know her name – not the one given by her adoptive parents, but the name on her birth certificate. This quest began […]
Date: March 1, 2023
The Poetry on the Marquee at the Coast Playhouse came down earlier this week on Monday, February 20, 2023, as the theater gets ready for redevelopment in the near future. Former West Hollywood Poet Laureate, Kim Dower, remembers what it was like to have her words in lights just a few months short of four […]
Date: February 7, 2023
Poet and urban historian Dolores Hayden reflects on how the dramatic spectacle of early aviation provided a bird’s eye view of 20th-century urban expansion.
Date: January 30, 2023
an armistice between my dead folks and my delusions I am a bodyof ghost—haint-kin cloakedin earthen flesh
Date: January 30, 2023
Alyssa Graybeal has written this frank memoir about her life with the rare genetic connective tissue disorder Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and its effects on her body, her queerness, her aging, her work, her emotions and her humanity.
Date: January 30, 2023
“17 Small Press Books from 2022 that You Might Have Missed” includes Coffee, Shopping, Murder, Love by Carlos Allende. “Coffee, Shopping, Murder, Love plays with the tropes of crime fiction by way of two memorable narrators, Charlie and Jignesh. Their connection—at first on an unsuccessful date—is rekindled later, when Charlie is selling a freezer…and Jignesh has […]
Date: March 21, 2023
As with many of Dennis Must’s other fictions, consisting of three novels and three short story collections, MacLeish Sq. is a tale about personal identity. Who are we, and how do we come to know the nature of our being in this world? In this most recent novel, what the imagination seizes just might be true, […]
Date: March 21, 2023
In confiding, conversational poems full of homey detail, Dower (Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave) plunges deep into motherhood, limning her relationship with her own mother and how it has shaped her life.
Date: March 21, 2023
The expansive and formally inventive second collection from Flame (Ordinary Cruelty) considers the cornerstones of romance—doubt, surrender, grief, resolution—through poems about hunger, exploration, and forbidden fruit.
Date: March 15, 2023
John Proctor is about to turn seventy when he decides to buy a small farmhouse on the outskirts of the now mostly desolate mill town where he had grown up. Nostalgia haunts his waking hours and he often reminisces about the happier times in his life. One day in wintertime, John sees a young man […]
Date: March 15, 2023
“Pacific Light may be a summing up, but it is also a new beginning, a book that marvels at the world while confronting loss through the lens of joy. Though individually dazzling, its poems combine to stunning effect, equaling—or even surpassing—the very best in Mason’s superb body of work.” —Ned Balbo, Think Journal
Date: March 6, 2023
In Pacific Light, David Mason returns to a familiar theme: his conflicting desires to go places and to stay put. This master of the narrative poem, and a well-established voice in American letters, has, after building a reputation as a writer of the American West, moved to Tasmania.
Date: February 15, 2023
Stay tuned for the review March 1!
Date: February 13, 2023
“At that moment we saw walking toward us a trio of bearded men in black robes mumbling to themselves what I inferred was the liturgy of The White Whale.” As he approaches the age of seventy—the final trimester of his life—memories of John Proctor’s childhood draw him back to the hometown he could not wait […]
Date: January 31, 2023
The end of the world is not for the faint of heart, and neither is Thea Prieto’s bold and beautiful novella about four humans pushed to the limits of climate catastrophe. Echoing the style of myths and examining the power of storytelling, From the Caves is about Sky, a young man coming of age and learning how […]
Date: January 24, 2023
In his gripping new poetry collection Plainchant, Eamon Grennan weaves a revelatory narrative, rich with precise detail, layered symbolism, and evocative imagery. Plainchant is a powerful compilation of personal reflections. Through his keen observations of the natural world, Grennan captures earth’s vibrant creatures, great and small. An undeniable master of his craft, Grennan is the […]
