Date: March 28, 2023
In his new book, the Japanese American peach farmer unearths his family’s painful, hidden history and explores its impact on his identity. In everything David Mas Masumoto does, from pruning peach trees to shooting the breeze with a neighbor, he’s thinking about legacy. The legacy he’ll leave behind, as a father and pioneering organic farmer, […]
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: December 5, 2022
A refreshing book, I thought – a collection of short stories that this reviewer started from the beginning rather than picking and choosing which story to read next, based on the title. The titles are intriguing and the tone of several stories is not exactly threatening or scary but placed me back in my childhood […]
Date: November 30, 2022
Diane Thiel’s third collection of poetry, Questions from Outer Space, comes after an interlude during which the poet devoted her energies to a travel memoir (The White Horse) and the translation of contemporary Greek fiction. Her first two collections (Echolocations and Resistance Fantasies) garnered acclaim, including the Nicholas Roerich Award, for their intelligence, wit, wordplay, and attention to […]
Date: November 30, 2022
The evolution of blank verse from Milton to Wordsworth, via Cowper, was not solely a change in diction and subject matter. Even as classical and biblical themes were displaced by a sense of personal mythos—and even while plain speech triumphed over grammatical inversions—so, too, was there a recalibration of meter. At least as riveting as […]
Date: November 21, 2022
A POET KNOWN for his narratives, like Ludlow, the acclaimed historical-novel-in-verse turned opera, David Mason curates the archipelago of intensely satisfying lyric poems in Pacific Light with the skill of a consummate storyteller. His imaginative sweep is evident in “The Air in Tasmania,” set in his adopted home of Australia, where “the land / takes flying lessons from […]
Date: November 21, 2022
Koertge inhabits – and endows – his various subjects with insight and humour, dealing out poems in the voices of car crash dummies, Aphrodite, Mickey Mouse, Little Red Riding Hood, and the Bride of Frankenstein, among others. All this sounds as if the collection is a laugh-a-minute, superficial thing. It’s not. It is funny, yes, […]
Date: November 17, 2022
A simultaneously elegant and sharp-edged exploration of the hidden past. “I am haunted by gaps in family memories, nebulous responses and twisted behavior that must be examined within the context of history—not to uncover excuses but rather reveal family baggage we all must carry and learn to live with,” writes Masumoto near the beginning of […]
Date: November 17, 2022
A mordantly tender triumph rich with natural imagery. Uschuk’s poetry collection calls out authoritarianism and social injustice. This moving set of poems offer messages of hope as it addresses timely issues. It’s divided into four sections—“Skull Song,” “Axis,” “Liquid Book of the Dead,” and “Speaking of Angels and Ghosts”—and deals with a broad spectrum of […]
Date: November 16, 2022
“Paired with artist Patricia Wakida’s haunting illustrations, the book’s rich, lyrical language evokes both cultural eloquence and California’s seasonal beauty. Poignant and reflective, Secret Harvests is a family saga of quiet endurance and bittersweet triumphs.” — Meg Nola, Foreword Reviews
Date: November 14, 2022
The title of your book Your Nostalgia is Killing Me, seems to be an ironic one. The protagonist’s nostalgia is seemingly running havoc on his own life. He can’t escape revisiting the past and all the losses he has incurred: losses in love, familial losses, and the loss wrought by the AIDS epidemic.
Date: November 9, 2022
Though Marybeth Holleman is the author of several nonfiction books centering around environmental issues and her chosen home of Alaska, tender gravity is her debut collection of poetry. Its title is drawn from its opening poem, “The Beating Heart, Minus Gravity,” wherein the speaker experiences a dream, or perhaps a nightmare, of “diving / to the blue […]
