Last Book I Loved
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The Last Book I Loved: Mathilda Savitch
I befriended this narrator immediately—not necessarily because I agreed with her, but because I believed her.
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The Last Poem I Loved: “The Terrible Angel” by Russell Edson
I love prose poems. Prose poems sacrifice the agility of line breaks for the raw power of the sentence. Poems with line breaks are undersized receivers who run intricate routes. Prose poems are strongside linebackers waiting to unleash a terrible…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond” by E. E. Cummings
“Somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond” is not only the Last Poem I Loved, it also is actually the first. The way its writer (of whom I shall elaborate later on) likens one fine woman to flowers (and to a…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Cockroach” by Randall Mann
More accurately: the last poem I envied, and isn’t envy but one form of love? From time to time you come across a poem that makes you stop, read (once, then again, and again, which in 2011, is quite a…
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The Last Book I Loved: Orphans
The last book I loved was Charles D’Ambrosio’s essay collection, Orphans—but in fact, I loved the book before I read it. Smitten with the small format, I plucked it from a bookstore shelf, coveting the somber jacket painting (by designer…
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Danya Glabau: The Last Book I Loved, In the Metro
To speak of “the other” is often to say very little nowadays. There are big-O others, little-o others, psychoanalytic others, (post)colonial others, others who punish and spy on us when we are least aware of it, others who choose their…
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The Last Book I Loved: Testify
I’ve been a fan of Joseph Lease’s poetry since I read his first book, Human Rights; and his latest, aptly-named collection, Testify, just released in April from Coffee House Press, is as taut and thrilling, as full of urgency and…
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Evan Fleischer: The Last Book I Loved, Assignment: Churchill
The last book I loved–the book I wanted to take to a sandbox and introduce to Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory where I could watch one send a Matchbox car through the sand and another a green soldier, one saying…
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Erin Dorsey: The Last Book I Loved, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was exceedingly more interesting than I’d expected. My only knowledge of the story was that Dr. Jekyll drinks a potion and turns into a monster, who calls himself Mr. Hyde. I’d actually had the two…
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Robert Stubblefield The Last Book I Loved, Honey in the Horn
Ask a group of book-loving Oregonians who their only Pulitzer Prize winner in fiction is, and what do you suppose the percentage of correct answers might be? Easier to predict would perhaps be the most frequent incorrect answer. My money…
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The Last Book (of Poetry) I Loved: Rose
Inside a used bookstore at a grotesquely outsized strip mall in Fremont, California, I first pulled Li-Young Lee’s 1986 chapbook Rose from the shelf, a volume so thin the spine hardly held a label. Rose was pushed all the way…
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Ederynn Khushrenada: The Last Book I Loved, The Day the Holocaust Began: The Odyssey of Herschel Grynszpan
There are only two disappointments in Gerald Schwab’s The Day the Holocaust Began: The Odyssey of Herschel Grynszpan. One is the zong-I’m-blind! DayGlo op art cover. I mean, really. For god’s sake this is a $117 book, and Herschel Grynszpan…