The Other

A Sanctioned Babel: On fleshing out text, a visit with Cecil Taylor, and a re-wilding of language. “The pleasure of the text is the moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas I do.” —Roland Barthes, from The Pleasure of the Text … Literary rabbit holes, as [...]

A review of Anne Bauer’s Fine Absence, by Jennifer MacBain-Stephens In Anne Bauer’s poetry chapbook, Fine Absence ( 2011), loss is revealed through the completion of small domestic rituals. In the chapbook’s first poems (“Old Tapes, “Thank You,” “Eulogy,”) the reader does not know who or what is “absent.” Allusions are made to small disappearances: [...]

You Were Born One Time. Quitman Marshall. Ninety-Six Press, 2014. 70 pages, ISBN: 978-0-9797995-4-6 I take pleasure in some poets for their incredibly beautiful music, while others thrill me with their startling metaphoric leaps. Still others I enjoy for their sheer exuberance, the ability to transform dark material into light, such as Jack Gilbert and [...]

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The Projectionist In my dream, he’s a projectionist at an empty theater and I am winding the long staircase to his stadium of red high-backed chairs waiting for something to fill them. In this dream, we are still in love, and he is queueing Alice for us, the screen flickering from black to the strange [...]

Joanna Valente’s debut collection of poetry, Sirs and Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014), is a study in human relationships among different kinds of kin — speakers, strangers, and family members both living and dead — that fleshes itself out through an extended homage to sisterhood. Three sisters’ voices overlap and interweave throughout this text; by turns, [...]

Cult Statue of a Goddess (found poem, Getty Museum) 1. Its provenance based on what we might term “forensic evidence”? Briefly surveying in as neutral a manner as possible the bravura display of wind-blown drapery over generous forms of her body, illicit excavations in several archaeological zones, I would also like to welcome the observers [...]