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The poems in How to Read a City feel urgent to me, speaking as they do of ecological destruction and complicity. The elegiac feel is so delicately contrasted with the many musical resonances and the inherent call to take note of the beauty and joy that is still with us, however endangered. Everything “is a work of art”, and the final poem in the collection, “Soil Punk City”, makes clear, there is always a hope of renewal in urban regeneration in soil, planing, leaning to work together.
It is blindingly clear that what makes The Alchemist one of Paulo Coelho’s most epic and memorable novels is his ability to spin a simple story with a deep message. He evokes something human and universal that haunts everyone, everywhere: the pursuit of dreams. This pursuit is what keeps people alive, hopeful, and strong.
Even if World’s Fair doesn’t fit neatly into the horror genre, Schoenbrun does play with the expectations that we bring to horror films. We know that the film contains a source of danger, but our sense of what that source is keeps shifting. Is it the curse? Is it JLB? Or is it some darkness within Casey herself? In a brilliant move, Schoenbrun shifts the point of view halfway through the film, so that we follow JLB instead of Casey.
The author of Mycocosmic talks about her poetry book and the poets relationship to the natural world, to science, Emily Dickinson, rabbit holes, wonder, fungal life, teaching, grief, and lots more.
The invisible is a key concept in Diane Frank’s poetry and thought. It recurs in “Some Days You Wake Up Singing” (“ocean birds / continue their migration / to an invisible world”), “Quintara Street,” which is an elegy for her dead friend Mickey, who’d been a slave in a Japanese internment camp in Indonesia during World War Two (“When it’s my time / to walk through the door to the invisible, / I know that Mickey will be waiting…”), and in “The Last Sunset,” a poem whose tone is similarly elegiac: “everything you know / merging into an invisible world….”
And if this book should be read for any reason at all it should be appreciated for its stunning command of depth its language and scope of insight into what he (Pynchon) does manage to make obvious and that is the unequivocal depravity of the human condition in its ability to jump from the page and literally assault the reader with perceptions of delusion decadence debauchery and wantonness.
Carter practiced psychiatry for four decades. Her ability to translate perceptions, moods, and emotions from nature to humanity provides unique, original, revelations about the common flora and fauna of the Northwest. She is a master of the verb, the most important word in a sentence, and certainly in a phrase of poetry. “…vines ribbon, the ocean takes root inland, seed pods scab.”
An Impossibility of Crows by Kirsten Kaschock soaks fully in the chill waters of death and loss, the palimpsest of memories overwriting what we once knew. It’s rare that an adult can retain, not merely memories of, but the actual feeling of being a child. Orwell, writing about Dickens, spoke to the difficulty for novelists in doing so.
The Side Effects is a chapbook like no other. In “side effects to talking” the speaker’s “voice loses its balance.” But the poet never does. Time and again he goes to the edge but not over, in these visceral poems written by a poet with things to say, who says them very well.
A Single Witness is based on a true story in which a man is convicted of raping his daughter and sentenced to hard labor. But it’s not quite as simple as that in the novel. Anna Maria hardly comes out of it as a “winner.” Christine Balint develops the story from the scant historical record. There are no winners; there may not even be any “justice.”