We have a copy of The Heart is Meat: An 80s Memoir by Michael Backus to give away!
To win, sign up for our Free Newsletter on the right-hand side of the site and enter via the newsletter. Winner will be chosen by the end of June from subscribers who enter via the newsletter. Good luck!
Engaging the emotions that emanate through Li Po’s work, and with delicate strokes, Gonzalez packs maximum impact into snapshots of the natural world. ‘Pink yarrow garden’ and ‘patchwork planets’. Traversing the rural and the urban, the seen and the suggested. Lotus flowers, urban streets and vast mountains.
The eclectic mix of suburban memories and contemporary city scenes, meditations on motherhood, poignant encounters interspersed with a shorter clip of found poetry; ars poetica adds levity before Temporary Beast resurfaces in longer form poems delving primarily into the specificity of memories. Her sister crashes the Camry outside the family home, the names of neighbors and the local pharmacist meander Solfrian’s poems and emotions surrounding her mother’s death.
Madera’s book emphasizes a different kind of narrative pilgrim. Instead of a traveler headed out in search of a story, as Phil Cousineau writes in The Art of Pilgrimage: the journey “as nature’s pattern of regeneration, a journey consisting of departure, arrival, and return,” Madera’s narrators grapple with a perpetual sense of being adrift and often exhausted and burnt by the post-industrial world. These stories are about diasporas, transformations, fragmentations, and layers of meaning.
The poem diverges from the wistful, reflective joy of the wedding to the speaker’s own more volatile personal history, contrasting the innocence of the little girl singing karaoke and her own “vanilla ice cream” sweet girlhood. The speaker’s “I” creates a new emotional tenor for the poem, and the use of polysyndeton to connect clauses blurs time, creating one rich, expansive moment that contains the feelings of the speaker’s past, the reality of her present, the little girl’s identification, and Swift’s artistic influence, not to mention the reader’s own emotional resonance with the poem itself.
This collaboration with Theo Ellsworth is unique. Ellsworth’s style is reminiscent of R. Crumb, the underground comics pioneer whose iconic black-and-white cross-hatching and the exaggerated features of his character are instantly recognizable. Combined with Dara Horn’s erudition, the comic book style makes the ancient story seem somehow more relevant and more subversive.
The author of Bastardland talks about his latest book, his writing habits, the satisfaction of writing, social media, on unsettling a reader, the joys of publication, and more.
The streets, bridges, buildings, and cafés “where Prague lives” provide a wealth of stimuli to which Nezval responds with a catalogue of memories. His Prague is like the site of an archaeological dig whose layers expose various periods of personal history. It also is the site of shops whose windows display goods that take on hallucinatory appearances, and the setting for chance meetings with strange characters and events that touch on the uncanny.
The poems are raw and pull the curtains back to reveal intimate family dynamics and heartbreak. Death was real and claimed a young neighbor and she wonders about an afterlife and “starved myself to safety, transcendence”. With no real example of how to live, she had to “transcend”, “starve”, develop an eating disorder as a way to survive the death and destruction around her that was felt and yet hidden, unspoken, unacknowledged: “under tablecloths,/the makeup”, stashed in the “trunk of a new car”.
Hemant has a groom’s procession, arriving on a horse; and, of course, the bride is beautiful. It rains, torrential rain (the monsoon that follows summer)—and a long-awaited young man arrives, Umang (Jas Arora), and exchanges glances with Ria. The rain further washes away formality and pretense. Everybody dances.
The Ballad of Falling Rock is a stunning book that follows at least four generations of a family in the Appalachian region near Virginia and in tiny towns and forests. If you are a Hemingway fan, this one’s not for you. Or, if you are a Hemingway fan but maintain an open mind, you can read it and set yourself on a path thick with adjectives.