The Last Book I Loved: Dream Songs
My relationship with John Berryman’s Dream Songs, like the songs themselves, is murky, complicated, obscure in origin, and not easy to explain—not even to myself.
Blogs
5367 posts
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Genius of Adrienne Rich
I’m surprised by the amiable but lukewarm reception Ange Mlinko gives in The Nation to Adrienne Rich’s Later Poems: Selected and New. The 500+ retrospective was published late last year.…
Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva
Dark Elderberry Branch is a collaboration between two living poets and one who is dead but fully present. Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa (former Soviet Union, in the Ukraine),…
Swinging Modern Sounds #41: Utopian Communities
Bands, those funny little plans, that never go quite right, is a line from a really great song by Mercury Rev (“Holes,” from Deserter’s Songs), a song that rightly probes…
Spit and Mud
What I remember most about church is all the sitting, standing, and kneeling, the stink of incense, the calm of the priest’s voice, the hard wooden pews, and not really…
FUNNY WOMEN #93: Revised Pinterest FAQs
Pinterest is a million-page woman’s magazine written by everyone you’ve ever met and edited by no one.
THE NEXT LETTER IN THE MAIL: Elissa Bassist
The next Letter in the Mail, going out this Friday, is from Elissa Bassist. Elissa Bassist is the editor of our Funny Women column. Her writing has appeared here on The…
The Better Bombshell
This week marks the launch of the anthology The Better Bombshell, a collaboration of writers and artists exploring female role models.
Nick Cave Monday #22: “Jubilee Street”
Goth girls everywhere will soon breathe a collective sigh of relief causing a variance in the Earth’s orbit. We have been waiting since 2008 for a new Bad Seeds record…
Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me: Melissa Febos
In Whip Smart, Melissa Febos unflinchingly chronicles five years in her early twenties when she was a dominatrix and heroin user. But the book is about so much more than those details.
Lit-Link Round-up
In celebration of Valentine’s Day, I give you the most insanely romantic thing I’ve ever read. I want this adorable old Russian couple on my mantle. If I had a…
Links I Like
In Cat Power’s Ruin, she lists places where she’s been. She makes the places her own in the song, with rhythm and her pronunciations of locations. Two weeks ago I tried to mimic…