The Queen of Flash Fiction
In curt sentences detailing many unsettled lives, Kim Chinquee constructs a mosaic of despair in modern day America. Life is already hard, but attempts at intimacy (what many of the…
Posts by tag
Books
1061 posts
Time Loops, Child Molesters, and Sparkly Tube Tops
McGlynn’s book follows an almost fairy-tale-type logic – the unknowing past-self of the narrator plays the part of the last wife of Bluebeard, searching out the hidden rooms, with the…
I Was the Jukebox
Sandra Beasley’s crisp images and multiplicities galore construct an enlivened world for her reader, bringing what Gregory Orr calls, “authority of imagination…” Each poem is an experiment that recreates from…
Books For The Summer Travel Itch
Now that it’s summertime, one in three people who shop at my bookstore are looking for travel guides, phrase books, travelogues or history books about some enticing destination. Yesterday a…
Summer Rereading
“I think about forgotten gestures, the multiple signals and words of grandparents, lost little by little, not inherited, fallen one after the other from the tree of time. “Tonight I…
The British 20 Under 40
Great Britain is making its own lists. And Great Britain is still publishing novels. If you believe the rumors, the raging historical narratives are printed by hand, folded into folios,…
How to Catch a Falling Knife
It is not easy to make interesting poems, yet How to Catch a Falling Knife is full of them. Part of the interest is apparent in the work the title…
Utopia, What Are You Good For?
“But the question lingers: Apart from its questionable value as a marketing strategy, what is utopia good for?” Paul La Farge at Bookforum on the concept and uses of utopia,…
Simplify Me When I’m Dead
Keith Douglas has largely ceased to exist to most readers beyond those attracted to war as a subject. The reissue of Simplify Me When I’m Dead, containing forty-one poems, aims…
The Tense, Thrown Like a Switch
Farley’s poems live in the present, the past and the future simultaneously, fully conscious of their unrest.
Demanding a Degree of Strangeness
“It might be your own past, or even just the tomb of someone you’d forgotten and who, awakened from the deep slumber of oblivion, comes to life and steps onto…
A Gloriously Difficult World
Foreign aspects sometimes have a familiar whiff, and not just to Simic fans who have seen proof of his admission that Serbian poetry has affected his own. They have a…