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…
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…
Making the everyday feel important: An interview with Peyton Burgess
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…
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…
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…
“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 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…
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…
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…
A very nice negotiation: An interview with Uriel Quesada
I interviewed Uriel Quesada at an uptown coffee shop. Our conversation began the moment I joined Quesada at his table — he’s a dynamic speaker, very animated, excited to talk as much about himself as everything outside of himself. The interview…
