An Exhilarant Attentiveness (2)
By Cynthia Hogue. In the violent first decade of the 21st century, I cannot stop considering ways a complex, artistic mind approaches the phenomenon of violence. I’ve brought this obsession to class and workshop discussions of poets like Dickinson and Stevens, for example, poets who aren’t the first to come to mind when we […]
A Spy In the House of Love
By Marcia Aldrich. I wrote a scene for an essay called “The Mother Bed,” and I return to it repeatedly, involuntarily. Writers aren’t supposed to repeat themselves. The assumption is a writer works through the emotions of a scene and then lets it go. Whoever developed this theoretical ideal didn’t grow up in my […]
Act Three
By David Lazar. Everyone may hath two birthdays, as Charles Lamb suggests, but the same doesn’t necessarily hold for literary magazines. So with glee and bated breath (for blowing out candles, of course) Hotel Amerika is set to embark on its third act (oh, Scott, in America there are endless acts . . . […]
The Body Rights Movement
By Lisa Samuels. I’m seeing a Body Rights Movement rising up and gathering cogency. The U.S. woman with the mattress on her back, protesting her university’s unwillingness to expel her rapist; young women in Aotearoa/New Zealand chaining themselves to the police station to protest the dismissal of charges against the RoastBusters; recent U.S. public meetings […]
Privashing: A Primer
By Joseph Harrington. . . . the pretentious, universal gesture of the book . . . – Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street “Thank you for the opportunity to review your manuscript. We received over 500 submissions for the 2 books we publish annually. There were many outstanding works among them, and the decision was extremely difficult. […]
An Exhilarant Attentiveness (1)
By Cynthia Hogue. Moments when I am most exhilarated by poetry are moments when the poem is most alert, awake to the material, and the beautiful materiality, of which it is composed. It is fully present to what it’s discovering in—and transmitting from—an ineffable source, call it the ground of the poem. Attentiveness, as Rusty […]
Many Rooms, Many Voices
Staying in a motel can be pretty exciting. Sometimes, as we all know, it can be too exciting. Our Motel is a bit Brigadoonish, appearing and reappearing in different guises, except that we expect it will be a little grittier, at least from time to time. It’s not that the towels won’t be clean, it’s […]