Monthly Archive:: May 2016
“The poems toggle between wreckages”: An Interview with Kerrin McCadden
Kerrin McCadden’s poems illuminate life’s sharp-edged particulars, making the touchstones of this physical world resonate with the meditative music of our everyday existence. She’s the author of Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes, winner of the 2015 Vermont Book Award and the 2013 New Issues Poetry Prize, as well as the
Round-Up: #WritersOnTrump, Suzanne Collins, and the Northern Illinois University Press
From writers protesting Trump to a university-funded press closing, here’s a look at the latest in literary news: This week, over found-hundred writers signed an open letter denouncing Donald Trump. Titled “An Open Letter to the American People,” the letter outlined the writers’ issues with Trump, and claimed that Trump’s campaign “demands
À La Recherche de l’Amérique Perdue: Fantasizing America
To say that the French have a love-hate relationship with the United States is an understatement. We’ll be tssk-tssking Americans for their alleged anti-intellectualism and Puritan mores, while unabashedly dreaming Technicolor dreams of New York and California and happily binging on series. There’s also a strong mainstream appetite for
Planetary Poetry
It’s a comet, no it’s a planet, no it’s not a planet, yes it is. What is it about Pluto that so draws us to it? Is it that Pluto is so far away? Or is it just that we always pull for the underdog? Over the past few
In Bookstores Near You
In 2004, the state of Texas most likely executed an innocent man, Cameron Todd Willingham, for the murder of his three young children, who died in a fire in their family home. Arson experts later determined the fire was not intentionally set, and the story quickly became enmeshed in
The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Appellations” by Faith Shearin
Juliet famously said of Romeo’s surname, “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” which may be true, but also—as the rest of the Bard’s play argued—problematic. So what is in a name? “Appellations” by Faith Shearin (FRiGG) explores what bearing names can
Notes on the State of Virginia: Journey to the Center of an American Document, Query VI
Author: Kiki Petrosino | Categories: Nonfiction, Poetry, Series, Writing, Writing Advice No comments
This is the fourth installment of a year-long journey through Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. You can read previous installments here, here and here. ** Query VI: “Productions mineral, vegetable and animal” A notice of the mines and other subterraneous riches; its trees, plants, fruits, &c.
Review: SAD GIRL POEMS by Christopher Soto
This collection’s jacked up heart beats in its final piece, “Hatred of Happiness.” “Hatred of Happiness” rejects and buries practically every trope proposed by the mainstream LGBTQ movement. Gone are the banners calling for marriage equality and positive representations of gay life. Gone is the assertion that “we are
Writ in Water: Interview with Chris McCormick and “Desert Boys”
Author: Joseph Horton | Categories: Authors, Interviews, Publishing, Reading, Series, Writing, Writing Advice No comments
This month, I chat with author Chris McCormick, whose terrific debut of linked stories, Desert Boys, follows main character Daley “Kush” Kushner and his friends Robert Karinger and Dan Watts. The book is largely set in the growing desert suburbia of the Antelope Valley, 70-odd miles north of Los
What Fiction Means
There isn’t much that will make you more aware of a book’s message, and leerier of it, than reading it aloud to a child. Maybe this explains why I seem to have discovered books with such inordinately terrible messages during the three-plus years I’ve been reading to my daughter.