It’s possible to read Alejandra Pizarnik’s debut collection of poetry as a kind of midlife crisis. Published in 1955, when the poet was only 19 years old, La tierra más ajena, translated masterfully by Yvette Siegert into The Most Foreign Country, with its tiny cataclysms and brooding flashes of brilliance, […]
David Shields, in his seminal text, Reality Hunger, argues that contemporary literature has not kept up with contemporary art in terms of depth. Despite art’s ability to transcend image and space, to work duality of images and meaning, we, the literati, are still policed by comfortable tendencies toward text production […]
Jenny George’s The Dream of Reason reminds us of the liminal nature of existence; the poems exist on a threshold between states of being and move quietly between worlds. George’s book takes its title from the Goya sketch “El sueno de la razon produce monstruos.” In Spanish “el sueno” means […]
Anna Lena Phillips Bell’s skilled employment of repetition, which is the foundation of all poetic forms, creates a sometimes subtle, sometimes gaudy beauty in her debut collection, Ornament, winner of the 2016 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. Whether the poems’ occasions are a lace pattern, a garden, a melody, or […]
Melissa Stein’s title, Terrible Blooms, is good on its promise to weld the grotesque and the lovely so tightly and repeatedly that they transcend simple paradox and make of pain a single luminous skein. The poem “blessings,” for example, takes the form of a prayer comprised of repeated “may you […]
Heather June Gibbons’ debut collection is the literary equivalent of a carnival ride: it jolts, thrills, dizzies: you’ll step off windblown, with a little midway grit in your eye. The voice here feels relentlessly hectic, overwhelmed, a caffeinated oracle taking in and reporting on the signs and wonders of contemporary […]
My responsibility is to tell you the truth. – Dr. Christine Blasey Ford I used to systematically read the comics each day after making myself and my sister lunch, but I’d over-think them. I liked to read collections of wise sayings and then try them out in imagined conversations […]
Sari in a tear, face an ungodly mess, run of red from one lip to the other. Over there a blue-skinned flirt, a Krishna, looking past me at the goddess from the next lifetime, the one with the light eyes who shows off her belly ring, swings her […]
Process Notes Laura Christiansen on Collaboration In my artwork, I paint on found portraits and snapshots, cancelling parts of images and conjuring new illusions– all of which are further recreated when combined with a poem. I invited Marjorie Thomsen and Christine Poreba to write in response to my work. These […]
Process Notes Laura Christensen on Collaboration In my artwork, I paint on found portraits and snapshots, cancelling parts of images and conjuring new illusions– all of which are further recreated when combined with a poem. I invited Marjorie Thomsen and Christine Poreba to write in response to my work. These […]
