by Stephanie Elliott Prieto It is a tradition for intellectuals to speak out against power. This is why artists and poets are so valued by society. —Ai Weiwei In 2015, the artist, writer, and curator Ian Boyden contacted renowned artist Ai Weiwei about exhibiting Ai’s work at the San Juan Island Museum in Washington state. […]
Expanded and Newly Translated Tu Fu translated by David Hinton New Directions ($18.95) by John Bradley “The original is unfaithful to the translation,” Jorge Luis Borges once wrote, making light of the eternal debate about the reliability of translations. Certainly this thorny topic arises once again with The Selected Poems of Tu Fu, as David […]
Keith McCafferty Viking ($26) by Don Messerschmidt Keith McCafferty’s latest novel, The Bangtail Ghost, begins with a strange and violent death at the end of a forest road in the mountains of Montana. Blood in the snow, a puma whisker, paw prints, and drag marks lead to the remains of a woman’s mutilated body. If […]
Interviewed by Ashley Inguanta Chris Wiewiora knows how to begin and begin again. He was born in Buckhannon, West Virginia, and then as a child he started a new life in Warsaw, Poland, with his parents, who were undercover Evangelical missionaries there. Wiewiora grew into an adult in Orlando, Florida, beginning his life again in […]
Marie Lundquist translated by Kristina Andersson Bicher The Bitter Oleander Press ($21) by Greg Bem The speaker in I walk around gathering up my garden for the night, Swedish poet Marie Lundquist’s debut poetry collection from 1992 now translated into English by Kristina Andersson Bicher, is concerned with constraint and liberation, the effort “to survive […]
Edited by Chuck Palahniuk, Richard Thomas, and Dennis Widmyer with illustrations by Rachel Jablonski Turner Publishing Company ($17.99) by Ben Arzate Burnt Tongues is a collection of twenty stories from authors who frequented Chuck Palahniuk's The Cult website. Originally published in 2014, it went out of print when the publisher Medallion Press went out of […]
Bette Howland A Public Space Books ($18) by Daniel Byronson John Berger once wrote that “very few stories are narrated either to idealise or to condemn; rather they testify to the always slightly surprising range of the possible.” This truism illuminates the stories in Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, which are selected from Bette Howland’s […]
Massimo Bacigalupo Clemson University Press ($120) by Patrick James Dunagan Ezra Pound, Italy, and The Cantos unveils an intimate portrait of both poet and poem. Massimo Bacigalupo’s study is conversational in tone, yet nevertheless scholarly and astute, offering an overview of Pound’s many attachments to his adopted country. The book is composed in a series […]
Nina Renata Aron Crown ($27) by Erin Lewenauer “Living with a junkie involves a lot of effluvia. Everywhere, there are oozes that must be wiped away,” writes Nina Renata Aron in her gutsy, searing addiction memoir and first book. She dips and swoons through the darkness, freedom, and close encounters that add up to, for […]
by Zack Kopp Steven Dunn’s first book, Potted Meat (Tarpaulin Sky, 2016), introduced readers to his spare, powerfully evocative voice. The novel, about growing up poor and Black in Kimball, West Virginia, proceeds in elliptical fragments as opposed to a continuous narrative, giving it a timeless quality. Yet despite the universality of his writing, Dunn […]