A Review of RUIN by Cara Hoffman
I met Cara Hoffman in 1999 when we were featured at downtown reading series in Ithaca, New York. I had already read the manuscript of her novel, Running, which wouldn’t be published until 2017, and she had read my first novel, Specimen Tank. She was in her twenties and I was thirty-eight. Mutual friends had been telling me I needed to meet her for months. I was skeptical that her first book could be as good as they said it was, but within a few pages I was stunned by the precise prose and her savage sense of humor.
The Social Virtues Series
Recent Posts
What First Made You Cringe at the World?
IT BEGAN WITH WATCHING A VIDEO OF MOB JUSTICE ONE MONDAY AFTERNOON in October 2012. Later, I would come to discover how paranoid this video made me,...
Live like the Skeleton: A Review of The Fire Eater by Jose Hernandez Diaz
Jose Hernandez Diaz’s debut chapbook The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020) is a subtle and endearing surrealist love letter to the life of the...
When Tulsa Nearly Killed Queen
Like guests sitting next to a wedding reception’s DJ booth, I couldn’t make out hardly anything Patsy was saying
Two Poems
The satellites have been turned/off turned away from/other satellites.
Emoticonfiscated
It was me on Cookman Ave. that night/the newscaster was in the news/for what apparently everyone had always known
Confession
I did not consider the fact/That for the rest of your life you would only get older/If I’d been thinking, I would have held in my hand
Three Poems
In darkness / empirical evidence underhand / a fingertip rubs black / but not ink.
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...