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Divine Blue Light

November 1, 2023 - By Michael Thurston

A Review of Divine Blue Light (for John Coltrane) by Will Alexander (City Lights (Pocket Poets Series, 63), 2022)

Some poets, the best among them, make you learn to read their work. Sure, some structures and narratives inform their poems, but these are not familiar ones (the pentameter line, the regular stanza, the myths of Greece or Rome). The rules must be intuited then tested, confirmed in confrontation with the texts. A certain stubborn humility is required, but this attitude is also invited by the shimmering verbal surface, by the promise of some understanding to be wrought in the poem’s collaborative communicative act. You come, let’s say...

Beers for a Sober October

October 30, 2023 - By Marsha Bryant

I hear you’re having a sober October?
That option, for me, is a Noper.
But for you I’ve pursued
An assortment of brews
So your boozeless pursuits can be proper.

1.
Translucent, refreshing, and light
Is this Upside Dawn Golden. So bright-
ly concocted it zips
As it passes your lips
With a fizz on your tongue that delights.

2.
Just the Haze is a near beer that’s fruity,
With citrusy sweetness and beauti-
ful deep yellow hue.
And the hops that come through
Give some heft to this thirst-quenching brewski.

3.
Sober Carpenter’s ale, Irish Red,
Has a frothy and beige-colored head.
It’s malt-forward. A trace...

Calvino fa la conchiglia

October 20, 2023 - By Domenico Scarpa

(Fossilized ammonite mollusk. Photo by Adrien Vieriu)

Calvino fa la conchiglia

[Calvino/Italo Calvino
makes/does/imitates
a/the
seashell/shell/spirals]

La costruzione di uno scrittore

[The making/building/construction of a writer]

Editor’s note: To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Italo Calvino on October 15, 2023, the journal California Italian Studies has published a special issue, edited by Anna Botta and Lucia Re, titled...

House Parties: A Review

October 4, 2023 - By Miriam N. Kotzin

A Review of House Parties by Lynn Levin (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023)

Lynn Levin’s debut collection of short fiction, House Parties, offers the wisdom and humor of a keen eye and a kind heart. An accomplished poet, Levin, author of five collections of her own poetry and one volume of translation, also writes beautiful prose so skilled that it seems unselfconscious and purely spontaneous while being replete with perfectly balanced sentences, brilliant metaphors, and similes. The figurative language always develops character or reveals...

The Sea Elephants

August 28, 2023 - By Ellie Eberlee

A Review of The Sea Elephants by Shastri Akella (Flatiron Books, 2023)

“Once upon a time,” reads sixteen-year-old protagonist Shagun in a book of Hindu myths at the outset of Shastri Akella’s earnest and aching debut novel, The Sea Elephants, “the gods took away the first ancestor of the sea elephants, coveting him for his exceptional...