Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman once said about sight: “The brain has developed a way to look out upon the world. The eye is a piece of the brain that is touching light, so to speak,…
Posts tagged review
“Night’s Shadow-Grove of Losses”: A Review of Carl Phillips’ Pale Colors in a Tall Field
In The Art of Description: World into Word, poet and essayist Mark Doty demonstrates how Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Fish” “[tracks] the pathways of [the poet’s] scrutiny.” Bishop herself likened the process to the baroque…
A Queered Bildungsroman: A Review of Who Is Vera Kelly? by Rosalie Knecht
Rosalie Knecht’s newest novel Who Is Vera Kelly? (Tin House Books, 2018) aims to answer the difficult question posed in its title. In large part, it’s a coming-of-age story about a girl growing up in the…
A Loving Sister, A Fighter
A review of Inga Muscio’s Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Devil: My Life and Times in a Racist, Imperialist Society. Kathi Acker’s, \”I was unspeakable, so I ran into the language of others,\” takes on new meaning when I think about stealing, borrowing, and remaking into my own what this author has put forth. Now that Blue-Eyed Devil has been reprinted for us to pass down to our children and adolescents, who I believe to be the true target audience for her urgent and ironic voice, Inga is planning on taking our breath away by writing fiction.
How to Kiss Upside Down
“A professor told me not to use that letter / as the subject of a poem. // I don’t remember her name.” This complete poem, entitled “I,” is a snide argument for the insistent confessionalism that goes on in much of Poetic Scientifica, a confessionalism that is unwavering and brimming with warped comedy. Out this year from University of Hell Press, Leah Noble Davidson’s first book is a bold declaration on the capacities of humor and raw storytelling as means for emotional resilience.