TBD: Confirmation

The, really, the question before you, Ms. Ryan, is whether or not there was a legitimate reason, a poetical basis if you will, for your dissection of the poem’s closing thought in the manner you did, in fact, dissect it. And I give you the opportunity to explain yourself, if you can, here today.

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TBD: Other People

Next to them, this man, all alone and stone-faced, overdressed in street clothes with skin-head overtones, seemed more than out of place. He looked dangerous, or at the very least crazy.

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ALLY OOP THE ALPACA: Forgive Me

PLUS, another great poem by Painted Bride Quarterly contributor Arlene Ang:
What Happens to the Postwoman When She Stops Delivering the Mail
~@~

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TBD: As Yet Unsent Letters From A Relocated Man

I guess that’s the nature of any sadomasochistic fling; you make a habit of something kinky—like rubbing all sorts of humiliating creams on humiliating parts of your body several times a day—and eventually your partner wearies of what once enflamed him.

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Listen to This: Boundaries?

Kazim Ali’s recent American Poetry Review columns have been stunning. His most recent is a bad-assed belletristic constellation of texts (where he makes a common cadre in media studies—Paul Virilio, Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Zizek, and The Matrix—meet up with Melville & Dickinson), and it transcends the boundary of a “column” to become an essay.
Ali thus [...]

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Listen to This: REO Speedwagon

I have a major intellectual-aesthetic-poetry crush on Gregory Pardlo and Teresa Leo.
Poet Lore has a crush on Greg too. Cornelius Eady selected Greg as this month’s featured poet. Be sure to check out the stunning “Problema” poems included there–  http://www.poetlore.com/issues.php (Actually, APR had a crush on him first, awarding him the Honickman Prize for his [...]

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Listen to This: Technomagical Thinking

Ever pulled the plug on your hair dryer and blown a fuse? I knew someone who did that, then soon realized the power was out in her whole building, indeed the whole Eastern Seaboard. The blackout of 2003 had many of us feeling that undeniable feeling of “ooops.”
‘Fess up. Maybe you’ve felt it too, that [...]

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Uncollected Concerns

I’ve been missing zines today, and thinking about how they seem to have disappeared from my radar now that blogs have taken their place. One of the novels that I’m working on in my dissertation features a 16 year old writing a zine for victims of sexual abuse, and now I imagine he’d have [...]

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Listen to This: Convergence Culture

Gotta love the ironies of digital culture. A big fretful debate among publishers is whether the printed word is on the way out. But the first big internet retailer made its money selling books online. Amazon is a great example of what some folk call “convergence culture”— the term is a bit slippery: for some [...]

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To the Lighthouse

It’s late April and it’s 90 degrees in Philadelphia.  Right now I’m listening to the loud omnipresent hum of what I assume is a cooling device for the meat/produce store loading dock right next door.  It ends and, before I know it, it begins again when I’m in the middle of doing something else in [...]

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