Blogs
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Under the Maud Moon” by Galway Kinnell
A round- cheeked girlchild comes awake in her crib. The green swaddlings tear open I first encountered the last poem I loved, Galway Kinnell’s “Under the Maud Moon,” eleven summers ago, after a short trip to a novel writing workshop…
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A Soldier’s Handbook
The New York Review of Books covers the recently published guidebook given to American soldiers before heading to Vietnam: “Most American soldiers landing in Vietnam in the 1960s were handed a ninety-three-page booklet called A Pocket Guide to Vietnam. Produced by the Department…
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The Rumpus Interview with Cynthia Cruz
Her poems were spare, fierce, dark little packages that managed to feel both mystical—almost like fairytales—and contemporary with their references to drugs and Greyhound stations.
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Lit-Link Round-up
Navigating the world of literary agents, at The Millions. Some good stuff here, except that the longshot theory of “it’s all who you know” isn’t really true. I got my first two literary agents before I knew freaking anyone, and…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “The Bells” by Adam Zagajewski
My maternal grandparents emigrated from Poland in 1924 after experiencing the horrors of World War I. They arrived here with pockets full of hopes and dreams and little else. I never met them; they died before I was born. I…
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Ring of Bone: Collected Poems by Lew Welch
Lew Welch has been dead now for 40 years, just about as long as his total time on earth. He disappeared on May 23, 1971, walked out of poet and friend Gary Snyder’s house into the mountains of California, carrying…
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Arguing Against Perennial Busyness
A mistake is being made by our society, according to Ed Smith at the New Statesman, that those in the workforce are expected to be constantly busy. Workers spend a majority of their days seeming busy and trying to meet a…
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Alex Gallo-Brown: The Last Book I Loved, Magic Hours
Magic Hours, Tom Bissell’s recent collection of non-fiction, surveys his magazine writing over the last decade or so. It is a genre, he informs us in the Author’s Note, he fell into more or less accidentally; it is also the…
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Melding Web Content and Advertising
Choire Sicha writes about the visual evolution of the internet over at The Awl. Sicha discusses the fact that advertisements are being woven into the content of websites, such as promoted tweets from a corporation being plopped to the top of…
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Either Way I’m Celebrating by Sommer Browning
Sommer Browning’s Either Way I’m Celebrating shows effervescence, delight in language, and whimsy, even as it hides more introspective and severe undertones. Taking elements of surrealism from the Ashbery branch of American poetry, Browning also shows elements of Dobby Gibson…
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Dogs of Brooklyn by Susie DeFord
When poets decide to collect what they consider to be some of their best work into a manuscript, there are seemingly thousands of choices to make. Should all the poems be similar in style? What about subject? Should the order…
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An Elegy for Oxford American
There has been a shakeup recently at literary magazine The Oxford American. Editor and founder Marc Smirnoff and managing editor Carol Ann Fitzgerald were fired on July 15. They have since compiled a website detailing events leading up to and after their…