Prose is what we add to myth: Sam Taylor’s Book of Fools
The music at the center of Sam Taylor’s Book of Fools is a soulful dance between myth and memory. In this work, Taylor’s Orpheus, one of several interacting characters, accompanies the reader through the gaps in the underworld and the speaker’s inner world, tinged with loss and longing but sustained by the central feature of the work: the lyric.
The Social Virtues Series
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eight years
not nearly enough to cleanse the stench, funk / grime and crime within the walls of an estate corrupt / not enough to baptize a new beginning or / dissolve evil embedded in historical detail
On Thin Ice
KATHRIN SCHMIDT
Multi-award-winning contemporary poet and novelist Kathrin Schmidt was born in the former German Democratic Republic, her voice feminist, political, and distinctly of the east. Her themes range through unemployment, loneliness, suicide and disaffection, which she sees as characterising the experience of East Germans during and since Reunification. Schmidt’s novel ‘You’re not dying’ (2009) won the German Book Prize and will at last appear in English in 2021 translated by Christine Les.
SUE VICKERMAN
The UK’s Brexit vote triggered writer Sue Vickerman to throw a rope across to Europe by turning to literary translation. Being northern English, Vickerman empathizes with East German peer-writer Kathrin Schmidt who similarly hails from a region where people feel ‘left behind’ and where right-wing populism is on the rise. Sue has translated TWENTY POEMS BY KATHRIN SCHMIDT, Arc Publications, 2020. She edits for Naked Eye Publishing (UK). suevickerman.eu
Death and Hope from ‘The Heart of Darkness’
J. Chester Johnson’s book, Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and a Story of Reconciliation, brings fresh air and a fresh methodology to the ‘difficult discussions’ circulating today in America about race, racism, and racial reconciliation.
Three Poems
On Kansas 156 All the radio has to sayis eighties rock and Kenny Rogers.You get behind a horse trailerand stay there because you can’t seearound it and, oh man,the radio seek stops on “Right Down The Line,”Gerry Rafferty making love sound uncrappy whether you’re...
Blue Magic
(at Silver Lake, St. Anthony, Minnesota) If I stare long enough anything can look like home A...
Review of Maze: an epitaph for the soul
Maze by Matt Bialer.Finishing Line Press, 2021. Matt Bialer’s Maze is a wonderfully composed epic in narrative prose to his late wife, to society, and memory, done in rhapsodic meter, intertwining a chorale that echoes throughout from Bosnia, to his wife’s...
Summer Land
EVER SINCE VERNON WAS A TEENAGER, HE WAS GOOD AT SLEEPING. SO GOOD in fact, that his mother was scared he’d never wake up when he went to bed. Vernon held the record for the longest sleep ever taken in his family. And there weren’t many records between him and his mom, although she was good at all sorts of things.
Three Poems
Blue Dress 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— this dress hung with small moons of ice, tiny globes of light. It shines like a disco ball, awash with...
The Oppression Tables: Genesis
blackis not the desired colorof women black is too loud it needs a touchof something to...
Of Beasts & Feminism: An Interview // Review of FABLESQUE by Anna Maria Hong ~ Sarah Audsley
Writing within the constraint of a bestiary—a descriptive or anecdotal treatise on various real or mythical kinds of animals, especially a medieval work with a moralizing tone—Hong applies pressure through a feminist re-interpretation on traditional Greek myths, common Western fables, and personified animal tales.
Everything in Salt Water
Baptized at ten given too soon a clean heart a shiny new spirit so much left of me to make filthy. When I turned teenager my mother tells me to wash it well not to walk around in the world humming. Tells me drink it girl, it tastes the same when it’s cold. I’ve...