Poem
Building Muscle
Kelly Cowan
playing
Visit California CD
8 songs -
“get into that unique
California state of mind”
on exercise bike
building muscle
after surgery
Mamas and Papas -
in rhythm
Kool & the Gang -
now I’m moving
w/ cooke...
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Story
Cultivating Pippi Longstocking
Neil Martinson
One warm spring afternoon in 1990 I was walking across the Williamsburg Bridge on my way to Manhattan, as I’d done countless times during my years in Brooklyn. A recent, tumultuous breakup was still fresh in my mind, but I was beginning to feel somewhat liberated, enjoying the freedom of finally living alone, and learning to have fun again. The bridge scene from Pippi On The Run flashed into my mind, and in a split second I knew what I had to do.
In this movie, the heroine Pippi Longstocking’s indomitable approach to life achieves its peak expression, centering around her ability to achieve anything she wants, often by refusing to accept the impossible. The scene in my mind has Pippi and her two friends Tommy and Annika looking down from a bridge at a steam-engine train chugging along the tracks below. Pippi suggests all three of them jump off the bridge onto the roof of the moving train. Uptight Annika begs her not to do it, bu...
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Writing
The Prisoner
James Reich
I remember his gallows thighs. His cock swung like a rope. The camp was weighted with snow and silence, settled with barbed wire, starvation in its planks and silted soup. Among the black beds, in cover of crowding, we fucke...
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Review
(a strange awakening of light that takes the place of dawn) – Poems by Jim Feast — REVIEW
Thaddeus Rutkowski
(a strange awakening of light that takes the place of dawn)
poems by Jim Feast
Autonomedia
$16.29
The subtitle for Jim Feast’s latest poetry collection, “Poems for Lady Bunny: Chicago, 1972–1975,” clues us in to the time and place for these basically metrical, mostly long poems. As Feast explains in his introduction, Lady Bunny was a painter who served as his “muse, mentor and she-devil’s advocate.” This book, then, works as a tribute to and elegy for this artist, who died in 1977. Many of the poems are dated in the early to mid-1970s, when Feast was a young man. The book has an attractive cover painting by R. Brown Lethem.
In the book’s first poem, “For the Painter, Lady Bunny,” Feast describes one of Bunny’s “compositions” and by doing so sets out his aesthetic purpose:
The room draws near to the red beads
of rain on the window. The sun settles
like a rose covered over in snow. Now ...
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Poem
A poem by Boris Khersonsky, translated from Russian by Nina Kossman
Boris Khersonsky
A poem by Boris Khersonsky
Translated from Russian by Nina Kossman
***
three kings gathered in one golden sarcophagus
in the Cologne cathedral that survived the bombing
king on king prophet on prophet and magic...
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Review
Edward D. Wood, Jr., Selected Poems – Review
John Pietaro
Edward D. Wood, Jr., Selected Poems, Unexpurgated Edition
Black Scat Books, 2020
Yes, it really is that Ed Wood. Recalled in cult movie circles as the bizarro planet’s Orson Welles, Wood was writer-director-producer ...
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Poem
In The Shark World
Francine Witte
In the shark world,
even, there are rules, laws
about sleepswimming and razor
teeth and what the sharkbelly
wants. Like my father and his own rules,
laws for his kingdom, our tiny
apartment with the neighbors’ fo...
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Story
The Cowboy
James Reich
Here came a cowboy with sun-saddled skin. He had killed but once, but had killed simply, in Santa Fe where the turquoise tells. The cowboy was young with a jackrabbit’s poise, a buck-toothed boy, spring-heeled and dun. It ...
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Review
Everything Is Radiant Between the Hates – Poems by Rich Ferguson – Review
Kathleen Reichelt
Everything Is Radiant Between the Hates
Poems by Rich Ferguson
Moon Tide Press
In his newest book of poetry Rich Ferguson promises a puzzle. Or according to the poet, collaborations “with clouds creating poems continuously changing shape & meaning, depending how you look at them”. Rich doesn’t disappoint. Everything Is Radiant Between the Hates, published by Moon Tide Press and released in January 2021, delivers this and more.
Everything Is Radiant Between the Hates, poems by Rich Ferguson
In the eight section book, Rich Ferguson begins his lunar journey with relationships that end. When Rich addresses the tear from his mother who handed me over to the brass-knuckled moon in “A Worry Bead, a Blessing” and the amnesiac moon, a lunatic laundromat robbing me of my quarters in “When Her Blood-Red Kiss Stains My Breath”, he isn’t mixing his metaphors. The theme of moon repeats throughout this book, carefully...
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Essay
Painted Silence: Visual Metaphysics
Yuko Otomo
dedicated to Franck André Jamme (21 nov 1947 – 1 oct 2020)
16. Marvelously anonymous. Like an antidote. Or a balm.
26. … The lighter, the purer…
37. Abstraction. To abbreviate.
To see it all, finally ...
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Review
IN THE REBEL CAFE: Interviews with Ed Sanders – Review
Marc Olmsted
IN THE REBEL CAFE
Interviews with Ed Sanders
edited by Jennie Skerl
Clemson University Press
$120.00
Jennie Skerl has put together a magnificent intro/crash course to Ed Sanders, "second generation" Beat. Sanders, to many of us, needs no introduction, but he is not the household name that many of the "first generation" are.
Further complexity involving appreciation of Sanders is how many angles one can know him from. Many are more aware of his band The Fugs. Perhaps one read The Family in one of its revisions, Sanders' journalistic exploration of Charles Manson, (and among the absolute best of the true crime genre). Finally, one may know him poetically, and in particular, through his "investigative poetics" - journalistic, historical, data-collecting poetics, a refinement and extension of the political "list" poetry of Allen Ginsberg such as "CIA Dope Calypso," which arguably has its own musical influence from Th...
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Art
Blackouts Are Beautiful
Charles March III
These addiction/mental health medical note erasures are a cathartic attempt to creatively find the joy and humor in the absurdity of all of life’s ridiculousness.
On the Cover of Seventeen
Puff, Puff, Pass
...
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Story
Mermaids Are People Too
bart plantenga
“That happens to be nothing less than a mermaid.
An authentic, flesh & blood mermaid.”
—William Powell, Mr. Peabody & the Mermaid
Bikini Girl requested – demanded! – that I show up at the Monkey Bar in a...
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Review
Words Doing as They Want to Do and Have to Do by Eve Fowler – Review
John Pietaro
Eve Fowler, Words Doing as They Want to Do and Have to Do
(Radical Documents, 2020)
Speakers: Litia Perta, Rachelle Sawatsky, Celeste Dupoy-Spencer, Bobby Jablonski, Kate Hall, Dylan Mira and Jess Arndt. Recorded by Sam S...
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Poem
November Again
Peter Bushyeager
It’s November and there’s
a steady stream without
stagnation or scum as glitter
resurfaces in the trash mound
political races raise fear
and candidates come clean about
dark money cast into shady corners.
Po...
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