As the title suggests, I Want to Take You Everywhere is a collection of poems that reckon with the need to love, the imprisonment of love, and the act of negotiating the distance between the body and emotional needs in the relationship. This young poet, lays out her psychology, not unlike the confessional poets of the 1970s. The process of saying acts as a performative device whose action includes the reader as a participant, while the poet posits a second and primary listener, real or imagined, her therapist.
A review of Finding Theodore and Brina by Terri-Ann White
Terri-Ann White leans into this paradox in Finding Theodore and Brina, allowing herself full creative license in the almost impossible attempt to uncover stories that have been buried, obfuscated, or are just missing, to create an engagement rather than a re-telling. The result is a multi-layered, complex memoir that plays with the notion of what we can and cannot know while creating something as true as any memoir.
A review of Self Geofferential by Geoffrey Gatza
Gatza’s book is continually cooking up new experiences, exotic taste treats, and sensual liaisons in celebration of living life from top to bottom and back again. Somehow his America is always there front and center, in the big city wilderness, the desert expanse, or sleepy small towns leaning under the shade of trees. He has developed a keen eye and ear for using the right word at the right time in the right way.
A review of Shattered Motherhood by Donna F. Johnson
Not only does Donna F. Johnson bring her own years of experience to this, she also brings the vast knowledge and insight of so many others, both men and women. Written with authority and conviction and a profound understanding of the political and social implications of the situation, Shattered Motherhood is a vital contribution to the understanding of this all-too-often ignored crisis involving mothers of suicides.
An interview with novelist Jamey Gittings
The author of Jane talks about his latest book, his writing process, his influences and personal history, his themes, his new book in the works, and lots more.
A review of How to Be Avant-Garde: Modern Artists and the Quest to End Art by Morgan Falconer
Falconer gives us a detail-rich survey of those movements, beginning with Futurism, announced in a 1909 manifesto on the front page of Paris’ Le Figaro, and running through Dadaism, Russian Constructivism, De Stijl, and the Bauhaus, and ending with the post-WWII movement Situationism. The story he tells is of artists willing to break with art’s past and to reinvent its formal language, its materials, and above all, its relationship to life.
A review of Red Camaro: Poems by Dwaine Rieves
Rieves knots subjects together: moments of closeness, lack of friendship, learning to tie knots, rain, what the Bible says, pitching tents, sounds of rain. Thoughts do not happen in isolation; one leads on to others concerning a gesture, an action, a sight. In Rieves’ poetry, the reader’s mind travels with him. Is this “free association?” It is an exploration of a poetic mind, a mind that observes objects, places, people, and itself.
A review of Chronicle of Drifting by Yuki Tanaka
Tanaka, who teaches literature at Hosei University in Tokyo, teases out the etymologies of Japanese words throughout. “Two words for ‘heart.’ Kokoro means heart in a moral, spiritual sense,” he writes in one of the “Chronicles of Drifting” prose fragments, “it never refers to the organ. Shinzo, it always does.”
A review of A Line You Have Traced by Roisin Dunnett
In a future where drones diagnose humans, parakeets freely soar, and bananas are a rare delicacy, the idea of altering past events and shaping a better future for everyone captivates the reader. Ess, a member of a network preparing for the end of human life on earth, is primed to travel into the past to help save the present, quietly battling the novel’s villain: the dark side of our collective humanity and the ghosts of what might have been.
A Conversation with Richard Martin
I’ve been fascinated by Martin’s work since we first met in the mid 1980s. His observations are probing without condescension, and his special brand of humor highlights the peculiarities of human nature as well as the mysteries of the world. He is prolific but never redundant. Given the particularly turbulent state of the world currently, I believe his work is extremely relevant, and readers can benefit greatly from his insights.