surrealism

“I was a house / I was a witch” : Muriel Leung’s “A House Fell Down on All of Us.”
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“I was a house / I was a witch” : Muriel Leung’s “A House Fell Down on All of Us.”

“I was a house. / I was a witch” declares the middle stanza of Muriel Leung’s “A House Fell Down on All of Us” from the newest issue of DRUNKEN BOAT. This poem, in my reading, functions to present intermingling transformations that perform whatever an opposite of distillation forecloses.

A Midsummer Night's Dream painting
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On Magic

Magic in literature causes problems. It has always bugged me, just a little, that at the end of all the sublime comic mix-ups and supernatural complications in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we’re left with an imbalance in our two happy couples: one pair has been reunited by the reversal of the fairies’ love potion, and…

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Interplanetary Postcards: Lessons from the Martian School of British Poetry

Emerging in the late 1970s and already diminishing by the early 1980s, Martianism was a short-lived yet influential movement in British poetry. Principally associated with Craig Raine and Christopher Reid*, it derived its name from the title poem of Raine’s second collection, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979), in which the eponymous alien recounts…