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In her most recent book, Dandarians (Milkweed, 2014), Lee Ann Roripaugh writes in the borderland between poetry and prose, blurring boundaries and finding the unfamiliar music in everyday language. She is also the author of three previous books of poetry, including Year of the Snake, which won the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award…
John Gardner once wrote, “If there is good to be said, the writer should say it. If there is bad to be said, he should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living.” While I couldn’t agree more with Mr….
The United States is getting a new addition. In early 2017, the first museum dedicated to writers from the USA, the American Writers Museum, will open. Its mission will be to celebrate American writers and literature. The idea came from Malcolm O’Hagan, an Irish immigrant and retired engineer who is raising the funds for the project. He recently announced that the…
Four From Japan: Contemporary Poetry & Essays by Women is an anthology rooted in a specific time and place. No, that place is not Japan, nor is it the respective eras from which the four poets emerged. The time and place of which I’m thinking is New York City, 2006, the setting in which Poets…
Juventud Vanessa Blakeslee Curbside Splendor Publishing, October 2015 340 pp, $15.95 Buy paperback | eBook Blame radiates outward from the center of Vanessa Blakeslee’s new novel, Juventud, which begins in Santiago de Cali, Colombia, during the conflict between FARC and ELN in 1999. First-person narrator fifteen-year-old Mercedes Martinez blames her drug-trafficking father, Diego, for the…
Flannery O’Connor wrote, “The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it.” In her second-person flash fiction piece “How to Eat Chicken Wings,” (Tin House/The Open Bar) Kristen Arnett takes a long look at the object in her title, and what’s revealed is a story about overcoming and…
THE STATE WE’RE IN: MAINE STORIES Ann Beattie Scribner, Aug 2015 224 pages $25 buy: hardcover | eBook Maine, for Ann Beattie in her new collection, is a state of life, and that is the beautiful trick of the title, The State We’re In: Maine Stories. It is both the state, as in the location,…
Paintings of people looking at paintings, like this one, can make me fall into a dizzy sort of hole. Gazing at the painting to find, there, painted people gazing at a painting, suddenly I’m not quite sure where I’m actually standing, where the line between me and the painting is. It’s the same effect I…
Writers are neurotic. Are we more neurotic than other artists? Definitely. And it’s time we had our own advice column. A Dear Abby for our literary breakdowns. And if I have to volunteer to be that person, so be it. The letters have been pouring in—which is weird, because how did you know I was…
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