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.…
“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…
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,…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…