New reviews in GALATEA RESURRECTS #20 (A POETRY ENGAGEMENT)
The new issue of GALATEA RESURRECTS #20 (A POETRY ENGAGEMENT) is out and we have two of out titles in this issue. Do check out the whole issue as it's a real hoot.
http://galatearesurrection20.blogspot.com/
+ jim mccrary reviews BLAME FAULT MOUNTAIN by Spencer Selby
+ Eileen Tabios engages PRIOR by James Berger
Hurray!
Krystal Languell – Two Reviews and Four Readings!
Here is some great news! Krystal Languell’s book, Call the Catastrophists, has two excellent reviews out. One at Starr Review and the other at H_NGM_N .
with Robbie Wendeborn
Casa Libre
228 N 4th Ave
Tucson, AZ 85705
with Robbie Wendeborn
Marfa Book Company
105 S Highland
Marfa, TX
with Robbie Wendeborn
Diane Tapes Series
Maple Street Book Shop at Bayou St. John
3122 Ponce de Leon St
New Orleans, LA
August 19, 7pm
with Becca Klaver, Marisa Crawford, Sarah Bridgins, Barbara Henning and Anna Sequoia
Bluestockings Bookstore
172 Allen St
NYC, NY
Arsenic Lobster poetry journal reviews Carlo Matos' books
Arsenic Lobster poetry journal Reviews:
Review by Jessica Dyer
Counting Sheep Till Doomsday
by Carlo Matos
Big Bad Asterisk*
by Carlo Matos
Let me be really honest with you. When someone writes a book of poems that includes a “flatulence” section, he’s won my eternal love. That someone is Carlo Matos and that book is Counting Sheep Till Doomsday. My eternal love is in the mail.
“There are so few serious songs about shit,” he writes. Oh? Tell me more. He continues, in “In the Spider House”:
To a spider, it is serious like
an old-world table: expectations to be met, a
host’s ancient duty, life and death. They do
not dare laugh at a fart’s deep echo
At the end of the book, Matos and composer Stephen Jean put the words of “In the Spider House” together with music and performance notes. They write, “All ‘notes’ above the middle line of the staff are to be performed as burps or belches; all ‘notes’ below the middle line are to be performed as farts.”
Read more »PETRARCHAN by Kristina Marie Darling reviewed on GRL
Check out Gently Read Literature's new spring issue! In there is a wonderful review of Kristina Marie Darling's new book, Petrachan. Or you can read it below:
Life in the Margins: Kristina Marie Darling’s Petrachan
By Ben Moeller-Gaa
Poetry comes in many flavors. And I suppose that I can be kind of adventurous when picking what poets to read. One that I like in particular is Kristina Marie Darling. I like her work because she is not afraid to work outside of normal conventions and she pushes the reader to meet her half way with her narrative poetry. As a haiku poet, I really appreciate this. Good haiku give the reader just enough of a moment in time for the reader to step inside that moment, look around, become familiar with what is going on and fill in the rest of the scene to complete the work. This causes the poet and the poem and the reader to become one, as it were. Darling’s work does something similar in that she gives me just enough of what is going on to where I can step inside and complete the story myself. Not a lot of poets outside of haiku work this way, but she’s doing a bang up job of it.
When I first picked up Petrarchan, Darling’s most recent book, I experienced something that I wasn’t expecting to feel. I was completely intimidated. The book’s title makes reference to the great writer Petrarch, who is a writer of such literary distinction that he need only be referred to by his last name. The book is sectioned off into chapters named after his literary accomplishments, with two Appendices comprised of text taken from his sonnets. There are also bits of Sappho sprinkled in for good measure. Not being that familiar with the writers, only their reputations and some vague memories of college lit courses, I wondered how I was going to engage with the book. I actually brushed up on both of them via Wikipedia, of all places, before cracking open the black cover with a black and white still life photo on the cover to begin reading.
It didn’t take too long before I realized something, namely, that the intimidation of Petrarch was a ruse. The story that Darling tells, through her now characteristic footnotes, fragments, and found text poetry, has very little at all to do with Petrarch or Sappho, instead, it is about a heroine who finds herself trapped in a relationship with a mysterious and intimidating man.
At first I didn’t want to see what was really happening in the text. I wanted to be swept away by the details that Darling provides us, the references to strange documentary films, to love trinkets, to a vast house by the sea filled with endless rooms and hallways. These are the types of details I’ve come to know and love from Darling. But what unfolds here is something a little different. What unfolds, at least for me, is a true, but wonderful, literary tragedy. The heroine that Darling paints a picture of is one who is trapped in another man’s bibliography. She has no story to tell within their life together and so her story, her words; her life has been relegated to the margins of the page. She is only alive in the footnotes and in the fragments of poems and letters left behind.
It is a truly remarkable thing that Darling does here. She has taken the stylistic traits that followers of hers have come to know and love and take them to new heights. It is rare that a book’s format is so closely tied to the existence of its lead character, even more so for a book of poetry. It is sure sign of the growing mastery of her skills as a poet. I have read the book several times now and can honestly say that Kristina Marie Darling’s Petrarchan is one highly recommendable and addictive piece of literature. I can only imagine where she will go from here.
John Kinsella on his novel Morpheus - in the Southerly Blog part 3
On the Southerly Blog, John Kinsella has been a featured blogger. Here is his third piece, I'll Tell You A Story.
I’ll tell you a story
by John Kinsella
I possess two items from my childhood. Both are books. Somehow I have held on to these through the upheavals of my life, including having twice sold vast collections of books to support my various needs (and long-past addictions) twenty and more years ago. When I did my last big ‘sell-off’ in the early nineties, I managed to hang on to my early J. H. Prynne Poems and a few signed collections of poetry as well, but that’s about it. I occasionally run into people who remark that they own books containing dedications from writers to me. But that’s the way of it, and though I enjoy having books around me, I am not stuck on owning things, and have little regard for material possessions.
Yet I do have those two books from childhood. One is Bedtime Nursery Rhymes, which was given to me on my second birthday by my maternal great-grandmother Coupar. She wrote in the front in her very formal, aged hand: ‘To dear little John, on his 2nd birthday from his Great-Grandma S. G. Coupar 1965’. This intrigued me through my childhood, because it became my only memory of this Goldfields woman, and I long mused over the formality and affection working together in the capitals for Great-Grandma, the initials in her name, counterpointed by the ‘dear little’. Should they have been in caps as well, I wondered? This seemed to me as much poetry as the wonderful rhymes inside which I still know by heart and recited to my son Tim when he was still in his cot.
Photos on flickr
