Notes on the Cinema of Depreciation
I’m sorry I stabbed Vann Marsden in the eye. It’s terrible that his wife had to die in the aftermath. The fact that she was already ill and couldn’t take the strain doesn’t alter my sadness over her passing, but when a director takes all the movies you love and remakes them as stark, near silent catalogs of gestures, the critic has to respond.
The Social Distance Reading Series
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Three Poems
The languor, the drive, the traffic, the parking,/the walking blocks to public beach access,/down past an atilt row of porta-potties,
Seeking Shelter
Though the library was closed, the lights had briefly blazed on, and she guessed Baker had broken in again. When Susan rushed through the front door and saw Baker, she grabbed the desk phone and shouted that she was dialing 911. Baker then fled through the side door. Then Susan called me, the librarian of this one-room rural Vermont library.
Grief, Memory, and Language: A Review of Victoria Chang’s OBIT
Victoria Chang’s collection, Obit, seems to have anticipated the prolonged good-byes of 2020. In it, Chang says good-bye to loved ones, feelings, objects—everything we feel and know, who we were and where we’re heading—especially when someone we love is dying, and our sense of awareness is heightened.
Three Poems
I’ve hung my light blue/evening gown on the bedroom/door so that at night,/when I turn away from you to sleep,/I still have something to look at—
The Luminous World of Maurya Simon
Maurya Simon’s The Wilderness: New and Selected Poems 1980-2016 (Red Hen Press 2018, 218 pages) represents a life of questioning and perception, whether the scene is a backyard or a street in Bangalore or the ekphrastic poems of The Weavers or reflections on sinners and saints.
A Review of PRAYING NAKED by Katie Condon
“Here I am/in a century that has its eyes/shut tight,” writes Katie Condon in “Origin,” the first poem in her debut collection Praying Naked (Mad Creek Books 2020). Like so many of the poems, “Origin” moves fluidly between an I and an us, between the natural world and the one created by human beings.
Three Poems
what if i kill the stars first when a medical document asks my marital status i write, trying not to get my hopes up about sunlight that’s what it feels like even in the fuck me state some bleach-white beach in florida where i lived on bourbon with a co-conspirator...
Two Poems
It’s big enough already, longing distance, like the mind body problem, and like the mind-body problem, the stuff of mind and the stuff we mine is simply information, neither matter nor energy, the mind being software to the brain’s hardware.
Matrilineation: Homage to Nell Parker (1944-2015)
I’m trying to imagine you imagining me/finding, at the bottom of a plastic storage bin—/under clippings from your Daily Camera column
Uprooted
It was good to fill the sinkhole myself after the landscaper/botched the job. Beneath the plant he poised, thirsty/on red clay—divots of emptiness. Ten bags of top soil go in/smelling of the deciduous north, released
Two Poems
Is it the flaw no one had noticed in the inlaid featherwork from which we can infer