Dessa, Allan Graubard, Eve Meltzer, Edward Dorn, Annie Finch, Eric Lundgren, and more . . .
Interviews
Heads of the Hydra: An Interview with with Allan Graubard
Interviewed by Paul McRandle
Allan Graubard discusses the innovations and struggles of the American surrealist collectives that formed in the 1970s and how they have continued their activities today.
The Bertrand Russell of Hip Hop: An Interview with Dessa
Interviewed by Eric Lorberer
Acclaimed as a songwriter, performer, and recording artist, the whirlwind force known as Dessa wears one moniker with particular pride: writer. Download this free PDF of the complete interview with Dessa, a portion of which was featured in our Fall Print Edition. Her chapbook, A Pound of Steam, is available for purchase HERE.
Reviews: Poetry
Hot Flash Sonnets
Moira Egan
Egan’s new volume details the unsexy and unsettling symptoms of how “we euphemize this ‘moon of pause.’” Reviewed by Heidi Czerwiec
Spells: New and Selected Poems
Annie Finch
This collection spanning over forty years explores the feminine mystique and beyond with incantatory and timeless revelations. Reviewed by Bethany Rose Prosseda
Our Gleaming Bones Unrobed
Grant Loveys
Award-winning fiction writer Grant Loveys’s first book of poetry offers imagistic movement between embodied and disembodied forms. Reviewed by Erick Piller
Sailing through Cassiopeia
Dan Gerber
Gerber’s new collection chronicles how he shapes and is shaped by voices and silences of those who have come before. Reviewed by George Kalamaras
Tables
Alfred Corn
Corn’s latest volume contains both pithy beauty and overstuffed density. Reviewed by James Naiden
Reviews: Chapbooks
Front Page News
Jen Hofer
Through a series of newspaper cut-up poems, Hofer leads her readers through a recitation of the matter-of-fact violence that characterizes the pages of newspapers everywhere. Reviewed by Marthe Reed
Quarantine
Malachi Black
Black’s collection of crown sonnets moves in cycles: from desperate pleading to fervent gratitude, from solitude to singularity, from life to death to rebirth. Reviewed by Tikva Jacob
Reviews: Audio
Venerable Madtown Hall
Jim Cohn
Cohn’s eighth spoken-word and music CD not only captures his beat-like poetic delivery, but offers a DVD of this delightful performance. Reviewed by Kirpal Gordon
Reviews: Anthologies
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four: North African Literature
Edited by Pierre Joris and Habib Tengour
The fourth volume in this ground-breaking series of anthologies delves not only into the poetry of the Maghreb and al-Andalus, but also makes room for creation myths, folk tales, legends, riddles, pictographs, parables, proverbs, and novels. Reviewed by Brooke Horvath
Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics
Edited by TC Tolbert and Tim Trace Peterson
The diversity of writers and poems in this sizeable anthology is animated by such a rich diversity of identities that generalizing about them becomes impossible. Reviewed by Matthew Cheney
Reviews: Fiction
The Facades
Eric Lundgren
Lundgren’s debut novel is a well-written, well-paced, and atmospherically persuasive read that rewards the reader’s time. Reviewed by Daniel Green
Think of Me and I’ll Know
Anthony Varallo
Anthony Varallo’s third collection of stories brings together disparate elements of his characters’ lives, the uneven hinges that make up the human condition. Reviewed by James Naiden
The Block Captain’s Daughter
Demetria Martínez
In her recent novella, Martínez lays the groundwork for a new understanding of Chicano and Mexican-immigrant identity. Reviewed by Jenn Mar
Glossolalia: New & Selected Stories
David Jauss
Culled from over thirty years of writing, these stories complement each other remarkably well. Reviewed by Benjamin Woodard
Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge
Peter Orner
Orner’s stories exult and serve remembering and the heartbreak that so often attends it. Reviewed by Kate Petersen
Reviews: Nonfiction
A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change
John Glassie
A determinedly brilliant Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher misread texts, jiggled facts, and theorized through fantastical conjectures a world in which everything was interrelated. Reviewed by Douglas Messerli
The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600 – 1800
Steven Moore
The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800 smartly catalogs more books in the genre than most people will read in a lifetime. Reviewed by Scott Bryan Wilson
Two Interviews: Edward Dorn
Edited by Gavin Selerie and Justin Katko
& William Everson: The Light the Shadow Casts: Selected Everson Poems and Five Interviews
Edited by Clifton Ross
As these interview collections show, Ed Dorn and Wiliam Everson stand out as two self-isolated individualists with large, singularly unique and significant bodies of work. Reviewed by Patrick James Dunagan
Leonardo's Foot: How 10 Toes, 52 Bones, and 66 Muscles Shaped the Human World
Carol Ann Rinzler
Internationally bestselling health and medicine writer Carol Ann Rinzler gives the subject of our feet a fascinating medical and historical treatment. Reviewed by Ryder W. Miller
Railtracks
John Berger and Anne Michaels
This beautiful collection of conversations between two esteemed writers is equal parts history, poetry, and philosophy. Reviewed by Jesse Freedman
Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn
Eve Meltzer
Meltzer documents the late twentieth-century turn toward structuralism in art with a focus on works by Robert Morris, Mary Kelly, Sol LeWitt, and others. Reviewed by Pablo Lopez
Matsuo Bashō’s Poetic Spaces: Exploring Haikai Intersections
Edited by Eleanor Kerkhan
In this collection of essays on the master of haiku, contributors show how Bashō took a traditional Japanese form and made it new. Reviewed by Joel Weishaus
Writing Under: Selections from The Internet Text
Alan Sondheim
An exploitation of the very idea of terminality, Sondheim’s collection is comprised of interminable lists and incomplete catalogues, of ideas, of questions, of modes, of contradictions. Reviewed by Sandy Florian
Reviews: Comics
The Fifth Beatle: The Brian Epstein Story
Vivek J. Tiwary and Andrew C. Robinson, with Kyle Baker
The fab four play background characters in this well-wrought graphic dramatization of Epstein’s too-short life. Reviewed by John Eisler