Reviews

Fri Oct 1 2010 How They Were Found by Matt Bell by Garnett Kilberg Cohen The characters in Matt Bell’s first full-length collection of stories, How They Were Found, often Read more...	Fri Oct 1 2010 Pee on Water by Rachel Glaser by Danielle Burhop At the conclusion of Rachel Glaser’s first story collection, the reader finds herself blinking fast Read more...	Wed Sep 29 2010 Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews by Sam Weller by Karen Zemanick In this compilation spanning a decade of interviews, Sam Weller showcases two facets of Ray Read more...
Wed Sep 1 2010 From Old Notebooks by Evan Lavender-Smith by Barry Silesky This book defies placement in a genre, but that doesn’t mean it is anything opaque or mysterious. Read more...	Wed Sep 1 2010 How to Wreck a Nice Beach by Dave Tompkins by Charles Berret Tom Wolfe once quoted Marshall McLuhan declaring with "Nietzschean certitude" that artists are Read more...	Wed Sep 1 2010 Man's Companions by Joanna Ruocco by Hana Park Joanna Ruocco’s newest short-story collection is a keen manipulation of ordinary experiences into Read more...
Mon Aug 2 2010 No Such Thing as Silence by Kyle Gann by Charles Berret Innovative composers have always broken rules, but John Cage effectively broke composition. His Read more...	Mon Aug 2 2010 Poetry Roundup: Rosemurgy, Dobyns, and Lantz by Danielle Burhop Three reviews of new books of poetry by Catie Rosemurgy, Stephen Dobyns, and Nick Lantz. The Read more...	Mon Aug 2 2010 The Awful Possibilities by Christian Tebordo by Ankur Thakkar Imagine a high-school shooting updated with hip-hop attire, an organ theft gang operating out of Read more...

Views

The Moving Face (for Roger Ebert)

The first time I ever really thought about Roger Ebert it was because I knew he was warm, dry, and celebrating and I was cold, wet and furious. It was January 2005 in Chicago, and unsurprisingly it was snowing on me and members of Not Dead Yet as we staged a protest outside the Union League Club, surrounded by a row of news trucks.
On the Early English Essay: An Experimental Array

"Essay" enters into English untamed.
The Facts of the Matter

Here is how it happened: The door to the suite was open that night when I walked past and saw her splayed across a couch, one foot on the floor, one leg hooked over an arm rest.
Excerpt from Office Girl

On that Monday at the end of January, Jack Blevins, a questionable young man of twenty-five, rides his blue bicycle beneath the flurry, with tape recorder in hand.

Interviews

Douglas Foster: Interview

"We’re quite rightfully concerned by the level of unemployment in the United States and the ways people were devastated by the financial crisis of 2008, but in the circumstances people face in a place like South Africa, 10 percent unemployment would be heaven."
Stephen Elliott: Interview

“We all change; the things you want from writing, at a certain age, become different from the things you want later. I’ve avoided any obligations, and I still live like a child. I don’t have a wife and kids. I’m on my own. It’s a choice.”
B.J. Hollars: Interview

"Blurring the Boundaries was inspired by my own frustration with facts."
Karen Rigby: Interview

My poetry won’t suit everyone. It has been described as dense; I’m aware of that response, so I wouldn’t say “I hope everyone reads it.”

Reviews

The Game of Boxes by Catherine Barnett

At the heart of this collection, Barnett’s second, is an engagement with Kant’s idea of the sublime, namely that the self experiences both terror and dread in the face of the infinite—whether death or, as the Romantics understood it, the implacable force of Nature.
Whatever is Contained Must be Released: My Jewish Orthodox Girlhood, My Life as a Feminist Artist, by Heléne Aylon

The memoir, like the artist herself, swerves between cutting-edge installation art, the ancient passages of the Bible, and centuries-old Jewish law and tradition.
The Walls Behind the Curtain: East European Prison Literature, 1945-1990 edited by Harold B. Segel

This fascinating book, edited by Prof. Harold B. Segel of Columbia University, presents a rich sampling of writings by people imprisoned in the jails of the former Eastern European Soviet colonies...
Love: An Index by Rebecca Lindenberg

In 2009 the poet Craig Arnold disappeared on the remote Japanese island Kuchinoerabujima, while hiking near a volcano. Though Japanese authorities searched for days, Arnold was never found. Rebecca Lindenberg, his partner of six years, has now written Love: An Index, a meditation on their love and her loss of him.

Blog Posts

How Poems Move #12

Apr 25, 2013
How Poems Move #11

Apr 23, 2013
How Poems Move #10

Apr 18, 2013
How Poems Move #9

Apr 17, 2013