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If, as Will Shakespeare once said, all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players, then Jayadev John Richardson’s vivid and highly accessible autobiography, The Rod and the Rose lifts the curtain on a personal drama that is operatic in scale. The path of his life has formed an arc so extraordinary that we ideally need to track it from the upper circle. Don’t worry, you won’t need rose-tinted spectacles.
Klink’s writing is carefully measured, with a cadence that pulls the reader forward persistently. Strong emotions contain just enough curiosity to ground the flow. Her line breaks feel so natural, it’s tempting to forget they once had to be carefully determined. This morning, the sun still rose, but it will set tonight with more poignancy. The rain, like the stages of grief, pounds, weeps, self-sooths, and endures.
Juicy might seem an odd word to apply to a sophisticated layering of multiple renderings and contextual frameworks of ancient waka poetry. But through Fujimoto’s arresting haibun paragraphs, interpretive and spacious translations, and visual/graphic pieces that stand on their own right, these 20 women poets, and the eras they lived in, come to life in vivid, haunting detail.
One of the most powerful poems in this collection is “Whale Fall”, a poem that follows the descent of a whale as it falls to the ocean floor. As with most of the poems in this book this one works on multiple levels: literal, ecological, metaphoric, and emotional, exploring what humanity has done to the whales, created a “universe of useless things” with its hunted bodies.
In her newest poetry collection, Hover Here, Marjorie Maddox rejects the harried pace of modern life while never losing track of the urgency to move closer to what matters. What matters is relationship, and these poems invite us, even beseech us, to deepen our companionship with nature, ourselves, and each other. To do so means experiencing love alongside sorrow, remembering in order to forget, and embracing the shadows while noticing the flowers.
The author of Looks Perfect talks about her new book, its characters, challenges and emotional truths, her creative transition to novelist, Instagram, the relationship between being a rice crispy artist at Misterkrisp and creating a novel, the tension between authenticity and performance online, on the humour in the book, and lots more.
While The Land and its People may not mark a drastic departure from Sedaris’ previous musings and ruminations, it is remains funny and engaging while, at the same time, reflecting the current state of the world in quietly amusing ways. The book begins abruptly, as if in the middle of a conversation, and ends in almost the same way, leaving the impression that it could go on and on without exhausting the reader’s appetite for his remarkable storytelling.
Fabri has an intense style that demands attention, and then turns the gawker towards love, death, poetry, bridges, rats, a child. There are themes, there is ravishing. There is grief. Moonlight and muse. Men who fail and women who confuse. The poet’s pen lingers on lines full of spontaneous turns, unexpected delights in phrasing, metaphors that form out of nowhere and lodge in the reader’s brain. You will also chuckle.
The initially charming tale of a chicken in search of meaning and her friend, the prophetic toad Gibby, has the feel of a children’s book complete with Rudi’s own naive drawings, until it becomes clear that this is not a book for children, but rather a serious story about war, peace, humanity’s stupidity, and the meaning of life.
Whitney also addresses the rape of the planet, which comes from the same destructive, patriarchal impulses of greed and power. So much of the drama takes place in the youth jungle of school settings – high school, college, even middle school (junior high) and earlier.