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: May 7, 2009
Review by John Domini in GENTLY READ LITERATURE, December 2008It's called creative non-fiction, and these days there's just no stopping it. More and more commercial publishing depends on the memoir, ostensibly non-fiction and most, at least, remain reasonably true to the facts. Meanwhile, at universities all over the country a fledgling writer can earn multiple […]
Date: May 7, 2009
Safe Suicide reviewed by Rand Richards Cooper in AMHERST MAGAZINE, fall 2008In Safe Suicide, the Boston-based novelist, professor and editor DeWitt Henry has collected his autobiographical essays first published in literary journals such as The Iowa Review and The Harvard Review. With topics ranging from "Innocents Abroad" to "Gym Jerks," this loosely knit memoir offers […]
Date: May 7, 2009
Date: May 6, 2009
"Green is an intensely formal poet–not in tone, but in construction. Look at that table of contents again: five groups of ten. A desire for symmetry, some revelatory order. He can write a perfect sonnet, works well within couplets, finds rhyme a help rather than a hindrance, and finds non-standard forms. None of these is […]
Date: May 6, 2009
Dan Wickett, on the widely-read blog for his Emerging Writers Network, lists Earthquake I.D. as one of the best books of 2007, and awards it 4 stars. "A great, jam-packed novel about, well, here's where it gets tough, which to me is always a good sign. A family travels to Italy, mome wants to leave […]
Date: May 6, 2009
Praise for Earthquake I.D. from Thomas Burke, in THE LITERARY REVIEW (50/3, Spring 2007): "an exploration of contrasts: opulence and destitution; the loved, the loving, and the dissatisfied; intractable guilt, piety and sin; characters' faith in progress while deeply cemented in reality; all interspersed between studies of our varied, yet universal human contradictions. Earthquake I.D. […]
Date: May 2, 2009
"Everything I write requires this: Alphabet." A child sees letters first, "shape distinguishing itself from its background," but soon we lose the innocence of that first encounter to ideas of sound, sequence, and sense, some fixed order separating right from wrong. In this debut, White, a Dine' (Navajo), never gives up the innocence of the […]
Date: April 24, 2009
Dungy's first poetry collection offers a number of ways to look at what is considered to be a part of nature, whether it is a part of the plants or the people that inhabit a place. Some of these poems undulate with sexuality, especially in lines like, "Desire is the flesh, the fruit you cry […]
Date: April 22, 2009
Sholeh Wolpe's Rooftops of Tehran is that truly rare event: an important book of poetry. Brushing against the grain of Persian-Islamic culture, she sings a deep affection for what she ruffles. Her righteous aversion to male oppression is as broad as the span from Tehran to LA, as deep as a wise woman's heart. This […]
Date: April 19, 2009
Perhaps there is no present, and existence is built of the alterable past moving into the alterable future, and then through the opaque door of death. Or perhaps there is neither past nor present, as if the person were a ship on a journey through the perpetually mutating future. Kurt Brown"'s collection of poetry, and […]
