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Poetry

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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Review

THE FORBIDDEN LUNCHBOX by Richard Modiano – REVIEW

Marc Olmsted

THE FORBIDDEN LUNCHBOX By Richard Modiano Punk Hostage Press $20.00 (Available on Amazon) How can I review a book that reviews itself so elegantly in Richard Modiano’s own preface and Pam Ward’s introduction? Then there are remarks by Viggo Mortenson and Ronne Blakely. The list goes on. THE FORBIDDEN LUNCHBOX is, unsurprisingly, a very good, even great book. It is also Richard’s first, at age 71. Not even a prior chapbook of his own, ladies and gentlemen. What took him so long? The answer may be found first in his recent 10 years as Executive Director of Beyond Baroque, the Venice Beach, California literary center equivalent of NYC’s Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery. Like any true Platonic philosopher-king, he did not ask for it, let alone want it. Like the Roman Empire’s Marcus Aurelius, he ran BB with wisdom, dignity and humbleness. Alec Guinness played Marcus Aurelius in Anthony Ma...
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Review

The Menace of the Minotaur – a review of David Harrison Horton’s MAZE POEMS

John Greiner

MAZE POEMS David Harrison Horton Arteidolia Press Daedalus, with his genius, was barely able to escape from the labyrinth of his own creation which was built to contain the Minotaur. Theseus, with the aid of Ariadne and her ball of twine was able to defeat the Minotaur and free the Athenians from the Cretian sacrifice of their young men and women in the labyrinth. David Harrison Horton, in his most recent book MAZE POEMS, has made use of Daedalus’s labyrinth, Theseus’s cleverness and Ariadne's practical skill to take on the Minotaur of language. Language has taken on monstrous proportions in our modern era being used to propagate misinformation in the political realm. In contemporary culture language has too often taken on the lumbering weight of a didacticism that longs for fulfillment in the advent of a social realist hierarchy in a Year Zero horror utopia. Mr. Horton in MAZE POEMS has achieved the admirable end ...
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