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
Recent Posts
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.
At the Naples Botanical Garden
Through the bougainvillea and clematis arch, / past the placards for Screw Palm, Gru-Gru, / Powder Puff, blocking the sun from our eyes / to get a better look at a maroon bloom
The Elaine Race Massacre by J. Chester Johnson
This Green Mountains Review special feature by J. Chester Johnson includes an essay and poems that explore the Elaine Race Massacre, an Arkansas riot that occurred in 1919.
Beholding Hope: A review of Jeffrey Levine’s At the Kinnegad Home for the Bewildered
In At the Kinnegad Home for the Bewildered, Levine begins his cinematic collection with the lifeblood line of the book in the second poem: “we know there is something more.” As he shifts in and out of the domestic and the divine in his poems, we feel a deep longing for kinship and connect with a speaker who is unabashed in his belief in what isn’t wholly known. Sometimes, we are located within a piece of art, and at other times, we are right in the middle of a myth or standing there, cooking in his kitchen.
Notes from Isolation
All day I watch boats from the living room window. I do other things, of course, but I always come back to the boats—yachts, skiffs, catamarans. Occasionally, there’s even a dinghy, white or blue, with a small figure aboard, paddling madly.
I used to think there could be nothing lonelier than boating, but these days, I have reconsidered.
Do-gooders
Warm, radiant afternoon after days and days of rainy gloom,
the girls bursting with born-again good intention.
“I want to eat more vegetables. Carrots and broccoli and green beans,”
Giulia announces from her car seat.
Venison, Ham & Butter Beans
I wait. I listen. I look. Nothing happens. I think, so, this is hunting.
![[I should know emergency]](https://i2.wp.com/greenmountainsreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/57e8d0404e52ac14ea898675c6203f78083edbed5059744f742b7f_640_pills.jpg?resize=640%2C426&ssl=1)
[I should know emergency]
I should know/emergency/Call your/new/feelings
The Social Distance Reading Series
The Social Distance Reading Series
Brought to you by The Vermont School and Green Mountains Review
We’re thrilled to host The Social Distance Reading Series, a collaboration between Green Mountains Review and The Vermont School poets. In the wake of book event cancellations due to COVID-19, this pop-up series is designed to offer poets a platform for launching new collections of poems. At this point, we are focusing on collections by poets whose book events have been cancelled between January through May 2020.
Stay tuned for a new reading each Wednesday and Sunday.
Thanks,
–Didi Jackson, Major Jackson, Kerrin McCadden, and Elizabeth Powell, series curators.