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: April 18, 2009
http://edwardbyrne.blogspot.com/2007/04/leslie-heywood-proving-grounds.htmlMONDAY, APRIL 2, 2007Leslie Heywood: THE PROVING GROUNDSLeafing through the work in Leslie Heywood's premiere book of poetry, The Proving Grounds, one quickly becomes accustomed to uncovering sometimes uncomfortable and intimate details about the lives of the personae, often obviously representing the poet, in each piece's personal narrative. In the process, readers discover a compelling […]
Date: April 16, 2009
"In the debut collection from Kentucky poet Nickole Brown, readers experience the pleasures of poetry "the illuminated moment reverberating" as well as the pleasures of the novel–the narrative unfurling, driven by complex central characters. . . . Rich with images, brave with difficult truths, and restrained enough to avoid melancholy, this is a collection readers […]
Date: April 16, 2009
"If you feel that high emotion and unalienated confession is not art, as Slavoj Zizek might assert that it cops to the System where the individual is valued for trying to be different–this books asks the question: what do you do with specific experience you never chose and from which you must try to recover? […]
Date: April 16, 2009
"Brown's awareness of the book's form, its how in addition to its what, allows for these poems' rich complexities. The order not only forms a linear narrative, but layers experience. . . . Such raw and beautiful imagery is just one of the many threads that pull this book together. The moments result in nothing […]
Date: April 16, 2009
"The strength of Sister is in the details, some of which are constructed through Brown's diction, which is gently infused with a southern dialect but resists caricature. She writes of cutting her finger then blood "pollacking the paper with red' or of "fried comfort' or when her sister came home "bawling, colicky, dispositioned / bad, […]
Date: April 16, 2009
"To write of one's own conception, gestation, birth"to write convincingly of unknowable-yet-familiar moments: that is the power of poetry and the power of Nickole Brown's debut, Sister, a self-styled "novel-in-poems.' . . . It would be difficult for the book to flee the inevitable baggage of the Southern Gothic, yet it walks that high wire […]
Date: April 16, 2009
"Nickole Brown's poems marry an enthralling and tormented narrative with woven, specific lyricism to create a layered progression through a difficult past. Brown has immediate access to how the situations she evokes are processed by the mind of a child and can re-create that open and immediate seeing. . . . The aim here is […]
Date: April 16, 2009
"Using umbilicus as guide rail, the speaker of Nickole Brown's Sister–an unflinching and deeply intelligent first book–undertakes a hair-lifting expedition back to her childhood so as to return herself to the arms of a younger sister both long neglected and longed for. Proving that narrative and lyric are never mutually exclusive, Brown pulls the reader […]
Date: April 16, 2009
"It would be easy to say that this collection is an indictment, but there is nothing easy about these poems. They are each skillfully wrought pieces about impossible subjects. . . . Though she speaks of "straddling a fence," of "switching all the time / between isn't and ain't" ("Straddling Fences"), there is no question […]
Date: April 16, 2009
"Brown's forthright debut opens with an intimate address to a sister: "I tell you this story because it is / the story we need / to believe our offal is divine." . . . . A striking collection. The strongest poems are those stripped of commentary, in which rough memories are offered as strange discoveries, […]
