engram wilkinson

Possibility as an exercise of analysis: A review of Spree MacDonald’s MILKSOP CODICIL

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

Parsing the Relationship Between Sensibility and Memory: A review of Paul Killebrew’s TO LITERALLY YOU

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

Confronting the surrounding, unbearable silence: A review of Lauren Levin’s The Braid

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

“The beauty in this disintegrating landscape” – An interview with Nicholas Mainieri

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

The animating grief is unfixable: A review of Elizabeth Gross’ Dear Escape Artist

Dear Escape Artist Elizabeth Gross Press Street Press/Antenna,  2016 “Figures take shape,” Roland Barthes writes in A Lover’s Discourse, “insofar as we can recognize, in passing discourse, something that has been read, heard, felt.” Dear Escape Artist, an epistolary sequence poem by Elizabeth Gross joined with book artist Sara White’s ink drawings, assembles its addressee … The animating grief is unfixable: A review of Elizabeth Gross’ Dear Escape Artist

Bound by interrogative physics: A review of Stacey Balkun’s Lost City Museum

Lost City Museum Stacey Balkun ELJ Publications,  2016 Divided into two parts, Stacey Balkun’s Lost City Museum incorporates this division into what becomes an indispensible aesthetic whole, where seemingly unrelated images and moments—parties, mer-creatures, and museums (to name a few)—are bound by Balkun’s interrogative physics: Lost City Museum is a sensorium of motion, where conflict … Bound by interrogative physics: A review of Stacey Balkun’s Lost City Museum

The asking is never idle: A review of Carolyn Hembree’s Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague

Room 220 will host the New Orleans launch of Carolyn Hembree’s Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague, a collection of her poetry published by Trio House Press. The book won the 2015 Trio Award, selected by Neil Shepard, and the 2015 Marsh Hawk Press Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award, selected by Stephanie … The asking is never idle: A review of Carolyn Hembree’s Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague