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),…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
Every prison sentence represents compound tragedies involving family members and friends, the affect on the community where the crime was committed, and, of course, the prisoner whose sentence may or…