An Invitation to “Torment”
Torment, as defined by the American Heritage Dictionary, is great pain or anguish, physical or mental. The word is derived from torquere, to twist, as when a rope that is part…
Ripple Effect: Lawrence Sutin
Lawrence Sutin’s writing caught my eye initially because he’d authored a biography of legendary science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, and I am one of those PKD fans who finds…
Galvinizing Fury: Elizabeth Willis’ Address
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare has Theseus describe poetic undertaking as that which “gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.” It is therefore fitting that Elizabeth…
A Letter from the Editor on Women in Literary Publishing
Recently [March 2011, –ed.], the literary cultural organization VIDA: Women in Literary Arts released a report on women in magazine publishing, focusing particularly on book reviews. The results of their…
Writing the Cry: French and Francophone Literature
Is France still at the center of the French-language literary world? Or, to ask a broader question, is there a center at all? In the fall of 2006, five of…
Continual Critique: After the After of Ecology
The texts included in The Eco Language Reader (edited by Brenda Iijima; Nightboat Books, 2010) are not attempts at one sort or another of a genre of “ecopoetics.” They remain usefully outside any…
The Lyric LangPo Alarm: Rae Armantrout
Rae Armantrout’s poetry is informed by two key sources: first, the radical poetics of 1960s San Francisco; second, the terse verse forms of William Carlos Williams, whose poetry she first…
Last Rhapsody at Marienbad
Ben Mazer, now in his forties, looks like a terribly serious man in his photographs. He wants us to take his poetry seriously too. He publishes rarely and gravely: the…
Sex & Lies in Vintage Hollywood: Chuck Palahniuk‘s Tell-All
Told from the perspective of a surly, intelligent assistant-to-a-star Miss Hazie Coogan, Tell-All is a delicious slap in the face of an archetypal Hollywood of yesteryear. Like his previous novel…