Blogs
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The Rumpus Interview With M. Bartley Seigel
M. Bartley Seigel has a presence that fills a room. It is no surprise, then, that the prose poems in his debut collection, This Is What They Say, fill the page with a raw sense of place and longing, an…
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The Last (Poetry) Book I Loved: Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
As if Anne Carson were a geological epoch, a little ice age or a period of Cretaceous warming, I divide my life into B.A.C. (Before Anne Carson) and after A.A.C. (After Anne Carson). Few people can write like a verb…
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Lit-Link Round-Up
Emily Rapp is back in the house, people. If you, like a lot of people, can’t get enough of Emily, see her recent “Obnoxious Questions People Ask Me About Writing About My Dying Son.” Just in time for the holidays:…
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“The Lamp With Wings” by M. A. Vizsolyi
Love puts a lot of pressure on people to do things with each other. There are a lot of conditions to saying “I love you.” You have to act love out in the world, and it’s a big world, especially…
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Eleven
We don’t know how to talk about children anymore. We get so wrapped up in these shallow narratives about children being preternaturally advanced, about little girls wearing make up and dressing provocatively and seducing the camera, about little girls maturing…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Bruce Lee’s Advice to Poets
Who isn’t a devotee of advice from writers about writing? One of my favorite books in this guilty-pleasure genre to come out lately is Dennis O’Driscoll’s collection of witticisms and one-liners, Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry.…
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“Waxwings” by Daniel Nathan Terry
Daniel Nathan Terry’s second collection of verse, Waxwings, opens with “Scarecrow,” an address to the poem’s namesake from its creator: “Scare-crow crafter, burlap-tailor, / black-eye smudger, when I’m done, / crows mistake you for a man.” By the end of…
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The Next Letter for Kids: Lisa Yee
The next Letter for Kids, going out this Friday, is from Lisa Yee. Lisa’s debut novel, Millicent Min, Girl Genius, won the prestigious Sid Fleischman Humor Award. Her other novels for young people include Stanford Wong Flunks Big-Time, So Totally Emily Ebers,…
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SELF-MADE MAN #18: In Real Life
I used to believe that collapsing the Venn diagram-space between the public and private self was the best way to ensure authenticity.
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THE NEXT LETTER IN THE MAIL:
Lisa Jane PerskyThe next Letter in the Mail, going out this Friday, is from Lisa Jane Persky. Lisa Jane is a writer, photographer, actress and editor. Her fiction, journalism and photography has appeared in periodicals ranging from Bomb to MOJO to The Los Angeles Times. She made her…
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“Book of Dog” by Cleopatra Mathis
The domesticated dog, evolved 15,000 years ago from gray wolves, is not a reliquary of slavish dependence in Book of Dog, Cleopatra Mathis’ seventh collection, nor is it a token of the bourgeois middle-class’s presumed benignity. It is as necessary…
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“Melancholia (An Essay)” by Kristina Marie Darling
Kristina Marie Darling’s wonderful new book of poems, Melancholia (An Essay)—her fourth—is more than a collection of abandoned footnotes and glossaries (poetic constructs she has been mastering since Night Songs), it is a history composed entirely of an ex-lover’s curios—a…