A review of We Were Promised Spotlights by Lindsay Sproul (Penguin Random House) Lindsay Sproul’s debut novel, We Were Promised Spotlights, will no doubt resonate with readers who are especially interested in LGBT coming-of-age stories, but what makes this book stand out is the quality of the prose, the well-drawn, complex characters, and the compelling . . .
Read More
Winter kept us warm . . .—T. S. Eliot I’m writing this on National Beer Day in the United States, where we’re also celebrating National Poetry Month. So it’s a good time to catch up with the fifth Whitman tribute from Bell’s Brewery, Song of the Open Road. In these quarantine times when we’ve got . . .
Read More
Review of Paper-Thin Skin by Aigherim Tazhi, translated by J. Kates. Zephyr Press, 2019 For a debut poetry collection, Aigerim Tazhi’s Paper-Thin Skin is a work of stunning originality. Part of what makes this work so compelling is the way that it grapples with the mystery involved in the creative process, namely the act of . . .
Read More
Most great American train songs are really about people. But Walt Whitman’s “To a Locomotive in Winter” and Emily Dickinson’s “I like to see it lap the miles” are machinist at heart. They don’t depict engineers, stokers, and passengers. They don’t take you home, and they won’t bring your baby back. Dickinson’s . . .
Read More
A review of Odes to Lithium by Shira Erlichman (Alice James Books, 2019) There’s something apt about the fact that Shira Erlichman’s Odes to Lithium arrived in the world in 2019. That’s because this year is the 25th anniversary of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s landmark book, Prozac Nation, while Kay Redfield Jamison and Annie G. Rogers, psychologists who both . . .
Read More
What’s an elegy for Abraham Lincoln doing in a 12-ounce beer bottle? The third Walt Whitman tribute in Bell’s Leaves of Grass Series reinvents the poet’s preferred beer style as a confluence of American Black Ale and India Pale Lager. Bringing roasty malts and Michigan hops to lager’s crispness, Bell’s Brewery labels O Captain! My Captain! a . . .
Read More
A review of Houses from Another Street by Michael Thurston, Leveller’s Press, 2019. I have a confession to make, one that will likely get me in trouble. Come to think of it, the water I’m walking into here is even hotter than it normally would be. As it happens, our most senior fiction . . .
Read More
Translated from Spanish by James Badcock The hall is packed as people wait expectantly for the arrival of the bard. We snaffle a couple of free seats, surrounded by the young and not so young who pay us no mind as they gaze intently at the black curtain. This theatre was once . . .
Read More
A review The Son of Black Thursday by Alejandro Jodorowsky, tanslated by. Megan McDowell, Restless Books Alejandro Jodorowsky has been alive for nearly a century. For at least half of that time he has been a jarring creative presence in arthouse cinema, which is a difficult milieu within which to be jarring. His films such . . .
Read More
A review of Spectra: Poems by Ashley Toliver (Coffee House Press, 2019) “Kinesis,” the first poem in Ashley Toliver’s powerful first book Spectra, frames the collection’s primary strength: that of movement through trauma and the emotionally dark places in the female self, where one can be “plumbing / a violent kinesis. “This . . .
Read More