Books
Intimations and Hints
By Weston CutterCoincidence led to my reading Maryse Meijer’s Heartbreaker and Erin Stalcup’s And Yet It Moves overlappingly, and like most coincidences this one offered an odd cross-pollination.
The Underground Railroad
By Weston CutterImagine being as broadly good at anything as Colson Whitehead is at writing.
Requiem for a Great America
By Joshua AlvarezThe 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and election amounted to a cataclysm for American institutions and the norms that underpin the integrity of a liberal republic. History comes on slowly, like an asteroid traveling millions of miles towards a tiny blue dot, and then arrives suddenly.
What the Darkness Was For
By Dustin IllingworthWhat possibilities lie within the exquisite coil of the aphorism? What truths, what horrors are condensed within these tightly-wound, enigmatic whorls? What if that perfect literary pressure was somehow released, allowed to stretch itself upon the white of the page, to simmer, to scream?
A Poet’s Guide to Death
By Gillie CollinsEvery so often, Americans relearn a hard lesson: even our best poets are mortal. Philip Levine, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 and served as poet laureate in 2011, died last year of pancreatic cancer. He was eighty-seven years old.
A Poet is a Mood
By J. C. HallmanGenerally speaking, poems are monolingual. That is, what a poem has to say is generally held to be specific enough to be fixed to a singular language event.
Flower or Whip?
By John DominiYou might call D. Foy’s Patricide a long and sorrowful aria over abuse in the home and its lingering damage; or you might call it a portrait of the scuffling white male, here in the U.S., detailing their recent tumble from King of the Mountain; or then again, it may be a scuzzball spiritual journey, Siddhartha Goes to AA, in which multiple addictions shred a young man almost to bits before he staggers to a kind of Buddhist enlightenment.
In Conversation
DAN SIMON with Phong Bui
Dan Simon was among the first friends I made in 1986 when I was a student at the New York Studio School. We became friends at a time when we both were making critical decisions about our lives—Dan gave up being a jazz musician for a publishing enterprise and I turned from an art editorial role in the commercial publishing industry to be an artist.
In Conversation
By Godlis!
DAVID GODLIS with Jacquelyn Gallo
New York City photographer David Godlis spent decades trying to pitch a book of raw, imaginative, no flash photos highlighting an important slice of CBGB’s nocturnal history. But publishers didn’t get it. Was it a music book or was it an art book? No one was willing to take the plunge, and so, with his distinct vision intact, Godlis decided to take things into his own hands and produce the book himself.
