At fifty-eight, Ron Carlson is gray-haired, large-boned, one of those men who at six-foot-something is big without being imposing. He could pass for a park ranger at the Grand Canyon, or your local TV anchor, or maybe a third-base coach in the majors, and he seems solid and grounded in ways that go with those…
Meet the other man in black: David St. John, poet of the lush, the surreal, the erotic, and the exotic. His work is intellectual yet always sensual. His poetic voice is at once profound yet grounded in contemporary diction and idiom. St. John lives in Venice, California (even if his psychic self resides in that…
Walking through Kevin Young’s house outside of Boston is like taking a physical journey through his poetry. Something of a collector, he’s filled his home with old books and photographs, contemporary art, vinyl records, and other cultural memorabilia. "I’m a pack rat," says Young. "I keep everything." It started when he was a kid, collecting…
When Martín Espada turned twenty, a family friend gave him a copy of the anthology Latin American Revolutionary Poetry. Along with the gift, the friend ventured some words of prophecy: "Tú también serás poeta," he told Espada—"You will also become a poet." The book had been edited by Roberto Márquez, a Nuyorican (New York–born Puerto…
Ask most writers about their craft, and they’ll likely talk about character, setting, and narrative arc—the simple rise and fall of dramatic action. Ask Antonya Nelson, and she’ll surprise you with the structures and schematics she refers to as shape. Her story "Loaded Gun," for instance, tells of a teenager’s mounting frustration with her family…
To say this fine fall morning that Joy is in the air is true: courtesy of KSUT-FM, broadcasting from the Southern Ute Reservation, this startling cut from the CD Letter from the End of the Twentieth Century, half-read, half-sung, is one of many by Joy Harjo and her band, Poetic Justice, regularly heard on FM…
Although the virtuosity of her prose announces her as a serious author indeed, Amy Bloom is too sensible—and too funny—to get carried away with herself. A relative latecomer to the art, Bloom has written two acclaimed story collections, a novel, and a book of nonfiction essays; she contributes to top-drawer magazines, including The New Yorker,…
Just a glance at the spines of Campbell McGrath’s five full-length collections of poetry—Capitalism, American Noise, Spring Comes to Chicago, Road Atlas, and Florida Poems—suggests both his favorite subject, American culture in all its exasperating, glorious abundance, and his favorite setting, the open road. McGrath’s first book, Capitalism, simultaneously hymned and lampooned 7-11 stores; in…
Alice Hoffman is a prolific writer with a bent toward the magical and luminous, and it’s easy to imagine her at some fantastical loom, spinning tales of daily life turned to myth. In the real world, though, she works quietly and consistently out of an old Victorian house near Boston that she shares with her…
No products in the cart.