This is a series about women writing life, but sometimes the lives we write are not our own. We may have a personal connection to the historical characters in our poems or we may feel an inexplicable kinship, an irresistible calling to tell their stories. I’ve been told that I have no claim on stories…
I can’t think of a New York City poet who hasn’t read at the Cornelia St. Café and I don’t know of one who doesn’t look forward to doing so again. Tucked since 1977 into the block-long West Village street whose name it bears, the café hosts more than 700 literary, musical, and cultural events a…
Life After Murder: Five Men in Search of Redemption Nancy Mullane PublicAffairs 384 pages $26.99 American prisons hold over 140,000 lifers. Under the rallying cry “life means life,” parole is rare; some states have eliminated it. Graphed, the number of lifers over the past three decades looks like a steep mountain ascent, no cliff in…
Q: First things first: how did you become an agent? A: I resisted initially, spent five years trying to find a different calling, and finally realized that being an agent was exactly what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I worked for an agent (the wonderful Irene Skolnick) the summer after…
The Literary Boroughs series will explore little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to geographic location, it also continues to thrive locally. Posts are by no means exhaustive and we encourage our readers to contribute in the comment section. The series will run on our blog…
I don’t want to write this review the way I’m expected to write it. I know I should keep the “I” out and pretend the thoughts I’m about to express come from some objective intellectual place separate from who I am as a person with a history. I could write it that way—I am capable…
Before we move on to things literary, I think we should begin this Independence Day week with Fozzie Bear singing “America the Beautiful,” which my mother incorrectly identified as our national anthem during her citizenship exam (she still passed). Actually, I kind of wish it was our national anthem—I prefer its focus on the extraordinary…
In truth, I had never put much thought into the Akron Series in Poetry in the past, partially due to my own ignorance, and partially due to aesthetics. However, lately, I’ve been more interested in the Series, edited by Mary Biddinger relatively recently beginning in 2008. I love what Mary says about her aesthetic tastes: “I…
The Green Shore Natalie Bakopoulos Simon & Schuster, June 2012 368 pages $25.00 In 1970, when feminists in the U.S. declared “the personal is the political,” Greece was three years into a brutal military junta, where public protest was harshly silenced with arrest, torture, or exile to remote island prisons. Yet despite the fundamental differences…
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