Mastodon Writing Archives - Page 2 of 52 - Sensitive Skin Magazine

Writing

Review

THE BOOKSTORE BOOK, KARL MARX PRIVATE EYE & NAMING A HURRICANE – 3 Books Reviewed

Lehman Weichselbaum

The Bookstore Book Ron Kolm Pink Trees Press, 2023 Karl Marx Private Eye Jim Feast PM Press, 2023 Naming a Hurricane Madeline Artenberg Pink Trees Press, 2023 THE BOOKSTORE BOOK In The Bookstore Book: A Memoir, prolific poet and prosaist Ron Kolm submits his own version of looking back. For Kolm, speaking through prose essays and "poems" (really prose essays in chopped-up lines), the life of a bookseller was both a career choice and a special window to the world. As always, if you're a writer, you don't have to look for experience, experience will find you. From early adulthood, Kolm would hit town, and, like the rest of us needing a job, went shopping for one. And like many people of letters, he knew that a job in a bookstore would make the best personal fit. More often than not, Kolm's quest was rewarded. He found his jobs with often ridiculous ease, earning him a not overly strenuous workload, a sustenance paychec...
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Review

On Barbara O’Brien’s OPERATORS AND THINGS

Neil Martinson

In the early ’60s, Ace Books, a publisher known primarily for science fiction, released a small paperbound edition of a 1958 book called Operators and Things by a woman writing under the name Barbara O’Brien. Although ostensibly a work of non-fiction, it reads a bit like a missing Philip K. Dick novel; its subtitle “The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic,” while no doubt enticing to some readers, does no justice to this mystifying, true-life initiatory tale. The author starts out by describing her experiences in the competitive, male-dominated business world of 1950s New York, detailing the various “hook operating” methods by which her aggressive coworkers would ascend the corporate ladder: vicious techniques redolent of Cold War paranoia that ranged from simple slander to complex, backstabbing daisychains of Machiavellian proportions. The institutional sociopathy she details hinges on adroit, covert manipulation and contr...
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Book

The Absence of Angels – an excerpt

Christian X. Hunter

THE ABSENCE OF ANGELS, a novel/memoir by Christian X. Hunter, about his growing up in NYC, from the time of the Fillmore East to the AIDS era, was published by Sensitive Skin Books in April, 2023. You can find it on Amazon, or order it from your local trusted bookseller. Here's a brief excerpt: I've always loved Manhattan in the hot weather. As a small kid I was sent away to stupid summer camps in the country. I hated them. While being forced to learn the breast stroke in ice-cold water in some mountain lake, I'd be wishing I was at the heavily chlorinated Twenty-third Street pool near the East River, surrounded by thousands of New Yorkers playing and shouting in dozens of languages. While sitting around the campfire with my eyes tearing from smoke and burning my mouth trying to suck some shitty marshmallow off a pointed stick, I'd be thinking about how I'd rather be on Manhattan Avenue hanging out on the hood of a car, downing a sl...
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Review

Between Good Men & No Man at All – poetry by Pam Ward – Review

Marc Olmsted

Between Good Men & No Man at All By Pam Ward World Stage Press $20.00 Poet Richard Modiano first brought Pam Ward to my attention by telling me she was writing the introduction to his poetic collection, The Forbidden Lunchbox. I didn’t know her work, so he read her to me over the phone. I was instantly hooked by her images, candor and the gallows humor known only to those the System does not favor. Still, as an old white man and apparently retro Post-Beat poet, I would not have had the temerity to review her new work Between Good Men & No Man at All, but I was asked, so here we are. I already knew we weren’t going to get homogenized Hamilton rap or highbrow slam’s rhyming editorial language (i.e. non-imagistic). Instead I was surprised to be reminded of stumbling into an L.A. skid row grind house for the last half of Sweet Sweetback’s Bad Ass Song. Plus, like all grind house double- and triple-bills, t...
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