Before you stick your head in the oven, consider your lasting image. Premeditated asphyxiation by carbon monoxide bears quite the posthumous stigma. Next time you’re in Starbucks, ask a fellow customer: “Who is Sylvia Plath?” Most likely, he or she will not mention her Fulbright scholarship, The Bell Jar, or her Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry. That [...]
Category Archives: Reviews
The Sleeping Giant
September 30, 2010 – 11:17 am
The people? Well, they dance on. It’s a defense mechanism—the choreography of life—and the routines that we create for ourselves become all that we know. As the pillars of Wall Street crumble, as American unemployment swells—those who are employed? They dance on. As the United States government sends our patriotic overseas to spread our nation’s [...]
Exit/Entrance
September 17, 2010 – 6:08 am
“There are lives going on all around us,” remarks Younger Helen, the unknowing sage of Aidan Mathews’s Exit/Entrance. Like little spheres, lives go orbiting about their separate, solo courses. Although they do bump into each other on occasion, they are hasty to forget one simple truth: we are not alone. Take, for example, an apartment [...]
Absolution
September 13, 2010 – 10:02 am
Jesus was a man of words. “He said he would save the world,” laments the main character of the play Absoultion. He promised. Believers say he sacrificed his life for the sins of his people—but was he a man of action? Where was Jesus when Father McClennan raped 7-year-old Nathan O’Lone? Nathan didn’t see him. [...]
Kissing the Mask
May 28, 2010 – 5:07 am
Get a load of William T. Vollmann’s new title: Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater With Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Housewives, Makeup Artists, Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines. In other words, welcome to the work of William T. Vollmann. I [...]
John D’agata, About a Mountain
May 21, 2010 – 5:43 am
Shawn Vandor’s first book, Fire at the End of the Rainbow, is recently out from Sand Paper Press Photograph by Skye Parrott
