Jack Green’s Fire the Bastards! (Dalkey Archive Press, 1992) was first published by the author, in the author’s magazine newspaper (no caps, and the italics are mine), in 1962. The text was written on a typewriter (again, no caps, very little in the way of punctuation, extra spaces between sentences) mimeographed, and stapled. It’s hard . . .
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“It was the air. The temperature and density of it, like it was being compressed around the city. It was the emptiness of the streets and the quiet. It was the time: there was no school, no one wanted lessons, there was nothing to do but read and breathe and try not . . .
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A review of The Ground I Stand On Is Not My Ground by Collier Nogues (Drunken Boat Media, 2015) While the conventional approach to poetic production is additive, involving the careful placement of words on the void of the blank page, erasure poetry is subtractive, starting with an existing text and deleting material until . . .
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The other mothers covered their children’s eyes. April covered her son’s ears. She might have expected the animal to cry, or to struggle, grasp for breath. But from the bleachers, there was nothing, not even a crack.— from “The Rodeo” which appears in the Summer 2016 issue (Volume 57, Issue 2). Tell . . .
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A review of Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass by Dana Walrath (Penn State University Press, 2016) “I knew who I was this morning, but I’ve changed a few times since then.” —Alice in Wonderland Alzheimer’s disease looms large in the American imagination. The stories and movies follow familiar plots: Parent (or spouse) . . .
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“The church looked strangely beautiful in the early morning light. The street between the houses was narrow and darkened the steps leading up to the wooden doors, but there was enough sunlight spilling out from behind the roof, and the Gothic façade—all angles and points and flying buttresses, architecture I’d always believed . . .
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It was the day after Christmas, and watching Danny Splighter skate for the first time in my life was like the holiday was happening all over again.—from “One Way Zebra” which appears in our Summer 2016 Issue (Volume 57, Issue 2). Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve written.When I . . .
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“When my mother asked me what in the world I wanted, we weredriving across the Sagamore Bridge. I could feel the vibration.I was ten. My mother had never raised her voice before.” —from “The Light, the Bridge, and the Fish” which appears in our Summer 2016 Issue (Volume 57, Issue 2). Tell us about . . .
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The tarthky was a beast from a different era, from back when the dunes were just a thin sheet spread over a second sea, the clumps of dune grasses bobbing like Lilliputian schooners. An adventurer with the right equipment could pierce the sand, dive through the floating grasses, and swim beneath their . . .
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Aleppo, Syria from the WSJ (May 4, 2016).Photo: Karam Al-Masri/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images Some twenty years ago, during the war in Bosnia, I walked into cities made somber by hunger. We unloaded packages for families found on the trip before: we distributed them directly, without intermediaries, storage sites, or stockpiles. I saw hunger in the . . .
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