Harvey on Alessandrelli: I first ran across Jeff Alessandrelli’s work in American Room Weather, a small, collaborative chapbook. I immediately did a Google search, reading everything he’d written that I could find online. Hooked, I tracked down his email address and asked him to send some poems along to Fruita Pulp, an online journal I […]
Bob Kaufman Edited by Neeli Cherkovski, Raymond Foye, and Tate Swindell City Lights Books ($19.95) by Christopher Luna Bob Kaufman will be forever associated with the Beat writers of San Francisco, despite being criminally less lauded than his white contemporaries. As with the best writers, however, there is a great diversity to his thematic and […]
Edited by Laura Kuhn John Cage Trust ($24.95) by Richard Kostelanetz More than a quarter century after his death, the American composer John Cage (1912-1992) is still remembered as fresh editions of his work continue to appear. A handsomely produced book, Love, Icebox consists of unashamedly personal letters that Cage posted to his future life […]
Annelyse Gelman and Jason Grier Fonograf Editions ($9.95) by Ellen Boyette About Repulsion, an EP by Annelyse Gelman and Jason Grier, is a diaphanous six-track exploration of power dynamics, the intersection of the quotidian and the profound, and the way in which technology creates a fragmented existence with edges of clarity and isolation. While each […]
By Scott F. Parker Note: This article is part of a multi-part series called Stories of Self, which is collaborative by design—each installment is a mutual product written “with” its subject, and in each case the subject was invited to clarify, object, suggest, excise, edit, and ultimately approve the final version. Originally composed in 2015, […]
By Scott F. Parker Note: This article is part of a multi-part series called Stories of Self, which is collaborative by design—each installment is a mutual product written “with” its subject, and in each case the subject was invited to clarify, object, suggest, excise, edit, and ultimately approve the final version. Originally composed in 2015, […]
By Scott F. Parker Note: This article is part of a multi-part series called Stories of Self, which is collaborative by design—each installment is a mutual product written “with” its subject, and in each case the subject was invited to clarify, object, suggest, excise, edit, and ultimately approve the final version. Originally composed in 2016, […]
by Timothy Walsh Kazakhstan is an ancient land with a fascinating culture little known in the West. Even though it is the ninth-largest country in the world, few Americans can place it on a map. It is where humans first domesticated the horse and the genetic homeland of all our cultivated varieties of apples. It […]
Wendell Berry Selected with an Introduction by Paul Kingsnorth Counterpoint ($16.95) by Robert Zaller Wendell Berry, at eighty-five, is as close to a prophet as America has produced in the past half century. The scion of a farm family in the hardscrabble country of Henry County, Kentucky, he began a literary career in the 1960s […]
Selected Poems and Translations of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra Selected by Vidyan Ravinthiran New York Review of Books ($18) by Graziano Krätli The premature deaths of Eunice De Souza in 2017 and Meena Alexander one year later have significantly thinned the ranks of anglophone Indian poetry, depriving the world of two major women writers whose birth […]