I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

By Carissa Chesanek

SEPT 2020 | Books

Laura van den Berg’s latest short story collection, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, focuses on women trying to cope with whatever life brings them, which is usually something traumatic, sexist, and violent.

A Percussion Orgy in Tennessee

By Walker Mimms

MAY 2022 | Music

After two years of pandemic silence, the Big Ears Festival came roaring back in March. Hordes of musicians carpetbagged Knoxville’s sleepy downtown for a long weekend of experiment and extravagance.

Michael J. Seidlinger & Dashiel Carrera

By John Domini

SEPT 2022 | Books

Michael J. Seidlinger’s Anybody Home? and Dashiel Carrera’s The Deer both deliver the goods, I’m happy to say; they prickle the back-hairs deliciously. What’s more, the dreadful material is matched by unsettling craft.

Oh, Say Can you Sing?

By Hannah B Higgins

DEC 21-JAN 22 | Critics Page

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about idols as something to sound: We imagine the hollow, golden calf that horrified Moses as full of air, a mere bloviator on behalf of the Canaanite fertility god, Baal. But Nietzsche pushes the reader to go further, to listen to the idol’s “famous hollow sound” as someone with “ears behind his ears,” which invitation theorizes sound about sound. WJT Mitchell theorizes metapictures along similar lines; they consist of “a picture in which the image of another picture appears” and which “may function as a foundational metaphor or analogy for an entire discourse.”