Posts by author
Nate East
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Engine Empire by Cathy Park Hong
There remain a few shops, labels, and presses in the United States that embody DIY artistic independence in the best way, combining the intensity and existential tenacity of hardcore punk with the zine culture’s relentless focus on aesthetics, history, honesty…
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Slashed Narcissi, Drilled Stone
In physics terms, the poetry world is underground “all the way down,” so Influence lurks in each sea cave like a bastard eel, recharging in darkness, awaiting his next dinner with flickering impatience and slaverous hunger.
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My America Isn’t On a Staid Map
Rane Arroyo’s character shines through in the amazing White as Silver collection, and will be clarified continuously as his vast trove of unpublished work begins to come to light.
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Star-Smoked Skies
Kuipers is a “traditional poet” with respect to her unwavering focus on craft; the engine powering her verse is tight word choice that simultaneously conjures up tangible, living objects and powerful emotional resonance.
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A Life Spasming with Furious Longing
The Salt Ecstasies is really just a beautiful book of poetry, filled with blindingly fierce imagery and destructively skillful writing, but it’s most importantly an honest book, its poems written straight from White’s heart and from his gut, teaching the…
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The Last Book I Loved: Just Kids
I finished reading Just Kids by Patti Smith at Four Barrel on Valencia Street in San Francisco and although I tried my hardest to blink them back, tears kept falling out of the corners of my eyes onto my cheeks…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Dear Augusta” by Reginald Dwayne Betts
“Dear Augusta” by Reginald Dwayne Betts speaks for itself as a whole art piece, horrifying and beautiful and eye-widening, and I’m finding it pretty difficult to write about it at all but it is definitely the last poem I’ve loved…
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Nate East: The Last Book I Loved, On the Lower Frequencies
The last book I loved was On the Lower Frequencies by San Francisco’s Erick Lyle, editor of the underground-classic Scam zine, freelance journalist, and musician-at-large. The book reads as a kind of political and cultural memoir, mostly comprising essays and…