First, a little creative encouragement from Grant Snider to jump start August.

Then, in this review, Andrew Fulmer examines Jeff Alessandrelli’s use of the poetic “factoid.” Alessandrelli makes a series of successful allusions in his collection, This Last Time Will Be The First. It is a “contemporarily fresh” collection that deserves our attention, Fulmer argues.

And in the latest The Last Book I Loved, writer-abroad Larissa Pham provides a lovely description of the bucolic French village where she encountered Michael Cunningham’s novel, The Hours. Her apartment boasts a rose garden, “a small turtle, a large turtle, and a clothesline, upon which all my button-downs have grown starchy and crisp in the sun.” Pham’s “surreal” experience in France is complimented by the “magic” of The Hours. Pham writes:

Cunningham has a way of writing like threading glass beads along a string. Each sentence is taken to its furthest point, its poetic and occasionally overwrought conclusion.