ROOM 220 presents the launch of Benjamin Morris and Myrtle von Damitz III’s Ecotone (Antenna :: Press Street Press) at 7 p.m. on Thursday, September 14, 2017, at Antenna Gallery (3718 St. Claude Ave.). Free and open to the public, the event will feature a reading, signing, and reception. Ecotone is a new volume of poetry … ROOM 220 presents Benjamin Morris & Myrtle von Damitz III’s ECOTONE
We’re back from a summer hiatus, and we’ve put together an incredible, non-exhaustive list of recent publications from writers around New Orleans, as well as a few from those who used to be in our midst. Tulane professor and Rona Jaffe Foundation Award winner Ladee Hubbard, whose debut The Talented Ribkins was released today, discussed the novel with … Recently read, a New Orleans writers round up: Ladee Hubbard, Anya Groner, Yuri Herrera, Barb Johnson, and more
Lena Cassie Pruyn Texas Tech University Press, 2017 [Editor’s note: Cassie Pruyn will read with Ben Aleshire at Saturn Bar (3067 St. Claude Avenue) at 7 p.m. on Thursday, May 11, 2017.] It is inarguably a good thing—and in no way detracts from Cassie Pruyn’s debut collection—that Lena does not quite live up to its title. Secrecy, death, … Let me into your grief: A review of Cassie Pruyn’s LENA
Standing in a metal bar just three days after Trump’s election, the American flag should’ve been a clear sign that the show I was at was about to get weird. The place was a stickered and dimly lit dive where I’d gone for the first time to see a friend’s band. Over the course of … Featured Essay: Heavy Metal in the Age of Trump
Milksop Codicil Spree MacDonald Slapering Hol Press, 2017 “Milksop,” meaning cowardly or indecisive person; and “codicil,” a legal addendum which in some way modifies a will. Spree MacDonald’s chapbook, winner of the 2016 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Contest, immediately asks a reader to consider the relationship between the interpersonal and institutional — and how that … Possibility as an exercise of analysis: A review of Spree MacDonald’s MILKSOP CODICIL
I met Peyton Burgess at an uptown coffee shop on the first day of spring. Under a blue cloudlessness, we discussed parenting (“earlier mornings,” reports Burgess), the immediate power of our iced coffees, and his debut story collection, The Fry Pans Aren’t Sufficing. Burgess’ collection, published by Lavender Ink, is as much about what Elizabeth … Making the everyday feel important: An interview with Peyton Burgess
To Literally You Paul Killebrew Canarium Books, 2017 Space, Henri Lefebvre writes in The Production of Space, is “a whole set of errors, a complex of illusions, which can even cause us to forget completely that there is a total subject which acts continually to maintain and reproduce its own conditions of existence.” Lefebvre cautions … Parsing the Relationship Between Sensibility and Memory: A review of Paul Killebrew’s TO LITERALLY YOU
In “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, Gayatri Spivak critiques Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus; she writes: “theories of ideology cannot afford to overlook the category of representation in two senses…[t]hey must note how the staging of the world in representation…dissimulates the choice of and need for “heroes,” paternal proxies, agents of power.” Spivak’s distinction between these simultaneously … Confronting the surrounding, unbearable silence: A review of Lauren Levin’s The Braid
I met up with Nick Mainieri at a Mid-City coffee shop; we sat in a vaguely lit corner while a robbery of rainclouds gathered outside, discussing the winters of northern Indiana (“painful,” Mainieri reports), the ecological impact of nutria hunting (“The thing about nutria that gets me is that to be a good conservationist, you … “The beauty in this disintegrating landscape” – An interview with Nicholas Mainieri
A few years ago, Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedecker asked me to contribute to their New Orleans anthology-atlas, Unfathomable City. My task was to figure out how post-Katrina New Orleans was changing. I’m not a reporter, so the thought of pounding the pavement with camera and fedora filled me with fear. Fortunately, the locals and … Featured Essay: Transition in New Orleans
