The Young Master, at age 3.75, is wild about robots and trains. Three times a day, he demands that I read him Robots, Robots Everywhere, a Little Golden Book about our transhumanist future. He has also discovered the Little Golden Books Classics set that someone gave us at his baby shower. Not a day goes
The cover of Paul Fericano’s poetry collection The Hollywood Catechism (Silver Birch Press, 2015) shows a smoldering black-and-white movie still of Burt Lancaster as con-artist preacher Elmer Gantry, with his bedroom eyes and well-thumped Bible. This characteristically American blend of flim-flam, movie idols, and popular Christianity sets the tone of this entertaining and original book.
Blow It Out Your Sinatra: Poems from Paul Fericano’s “The Hollywood Catechism” Read More »
I discovered Canadian poet Leah Horlick via an interview at Little Red Tarot, an excellent blog with an interest in queer and feminist interpretations of the cards. Horlick’s breathtaking second full-length collection, For Your Own Good (Caitlin Press, 2015), breaks the silence around intimate partner violence in same-sex relationships. Jewish tradition, nature spirituality, and archetypes
“For Your Own Good”: Leah Horlick’s Tarot-Inspired Poetry of Survival Read More »
The prose poem is the perfect form for surreal vignettes that combine the tell-it-slant quality of poetry with the relaxed unfolding of a prose line. As in fables, the first sentences establish mysterious happenings as the new normal. There is no time for technical explanations of this strange world that waits inside our own. Mary
Two Poems from Mary A. Koncel’s “Closer to Day” Read More »
Award-winning poet and fiction writer Arthur Powers’s work is informed by his Catholic faith and his concern for the dignity of the common man and woman. His profound short fiction collection, A Hero for the People (Press 53, 2013), drew on his activist work on behalf of subsistence farmers and workers in rural Brazil. I
Two Poems from Arthur Powers’s “Edgewater” Read More »
Contemporary poet Ruth Thompson inspires me with her vision of mature womanhood and life in harmony with nature. I reviewed her previous full-length collection, Woman With Crows, on the blog last year. The mature and courageous poems in her latest chapbook, Crazing (Saddle Road Press, 2015), teach us to discern the difference between natural and
Chapbook Spotlight: Two Poems from Ruth Thompson’s “Crazing” Read More »
Lisken Van Pelt Dus is a poet, teacher, and martial artist, raised in England, the US, and Mexico, and now living in Massachusetts. Her work can be found in such journals as Conduit, The South Carolina Review, Qarrtsiluni, and Upstreet, and has earned awards and honors from The Comstock Review, The Atlanta Review, and Cider
Chapbook Spotlight: Two Poems from Lisken Van Pelt Dus’s “Everywhere at Once” Read More »
In Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind, “Tara” was Scarlett O’Hara’s family plantation, a symbol of the supposedly idyllic (for white people) Southern way of life before the Civil War. The poet Catherine Sasanov references this pro-slavery myth ironically, tragically, in the title of her chapbook Tara (Cervena Barva Press, 2008), not as a
Chapbook Spotlight: Poetry from Catherine Sasanov’s “Tara” Read More »
In the Christian calendar, Pentecost celebrates the descent of the Holy Spirit into the world. As recounted in Acts 2, the Spirit enabled a diverse gathering of early Christ-followers to hear the gospel simultaneously in all of their languages, healing the disunity of human tribes that began with the Tower of Babel story. Nancy Craig
Chapbook Spotlight: Nancy Craig Zarzar’s “Waiting for Pentecost” Read More »
Full disclosure: Ellen LaFleche is my dear friend, writing critique partner, Winning Writers judging associate, and bohemian style icon. When you read her poems, you’ll wish she was in your life, too. Gorgeous and inventive as her language is, it is never merely pretty for its own sake. Her body of work has a mission
Chapbook Spotlight: Two Poems from Ellen LaFleche’s “Beatrice” Read More »