Readings
Sensitive Skin Beer Virus Reading #1
The Editors
Sorry, no April Poetry Month this year - but we've still got plenty of poetry coming your way (and prose too!). We'll be running virtual online readings for the duration of the shelter-in-place order (so...September 2021?). ...
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Story
Have a Seat
Richard Charles Schaefer
What do banal pricks dream about? You know the type; if he’s not your boss, he’s your boss’s boss, your father, or your stepfather. He exerts influence over some part of your life, and it’s not unreasonable to wonder...
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Story
Me and Neil
Joe McAvoy
There was a time from around 1971 to … well … now, I guess, when I was rather obsessed with a singer/songwriter from our great neighbor-nation to the north. Some who knew me in the seventies—I grew more discreet over t...
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Review
SOUTH AMERICAN JOURNALS January – July 1960 by Allen Ginsberg – review
Marc Olmsted
SOUTH AMERICAN JOURNALS
January - July 1960
by Allen Ginsberg
edited by Michael Schumacher
University of Minnesota Press
$29.95
First, I was immediately struck by how much unpublished poetry or early drafts (such as "Aether" and "Magic Psalm") are contained in this volume - far beyond any previous journal publications of Allen Ginsberg. In fact, he mostly wrote his journal as poetry during this period. Granted much is not A-list material, as Allen correctly understood in not publishing a lot of it. But for earnest scholars and fans, it is a gold mine. There are also amazing little notations of events, such as seeing Montgomery Clift's "Raintree County" ("he too looks sad" - in fact, Monty's face-rearranging car crash occurred in the middle of filming that picture). Likewise a long dream about Marlon Brando, who imitates Jack Kerouac's voice at one point(!) and includes a dream discussion of how great Orson Welles' Magn...
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Review
Among the Boat People – A Memoir of Vietnam – Review
Martha King
Among the Boat People - A Memoir of Vietnam
Nhi Mahn Chung
Autonomedia, 2019
Nhi Chung has been working on this book off and on for over twenty years. A few portions have been published, mostly "earlier versions" since rewritten -- but none of them in terms of readability, literary conventions, story-telling principals -- none of them WORK. Just the same, a comprehensive new edition from Autonomedia was launched at BlueStockings Bookshop on Friday, January 17. Why?
The lack of consistent timeline, the disjointed pacing, the flattened emotions, actually make Ms. Chung's book an amazing document and finally a deeply moving one.
Her book through its many changes, quotations from the work of others and evidence of rewriting "help", remains utterly artless. I know that word has a sweet definition. It can be taken to mean charm. Without guile or artifice. But at bottom "artless" means exactly what it says: Without art. ...
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Story
Intersection
Bari Lynn Hein
I come here every Friday. Same time – between three and three thirty, before rush hour. No one knows I come.
In the summer it was easy to gather the dead flowers from the week before; all I had to do was snap their dry ...
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Writing
The Liver of a Beagle
Ann Levin
If I hadn’t known before, then I knew on the plane. Everything was different. It was the first time I could remember that I wasn’t afraid of flying. I couldn’t drink, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t even need the al...
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Podcasts
S02E14 – Keshav Das
Bernard Meisler
Writer, poet and musician Keshav Das in conversation with Bernard Meisler.
Keshav Das
Keshav Das, was, once upon a time, an editor at Sensitive Skin magazine, when he went by the nom de plume Christian X. Hunter. He ...
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Poem
Dig
Ellen Pober Rittberg
People without teeth
depress me.
Is that wrong, wrong-headed
as does the lady
in the subway cleaving
to her whoever-he-is-husband
boyfriend lover eyes almost closed
unseeing is she blind
is she foreign
I mean Sca...
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Podcasts
S02E13 – Sharon Mesmer
Bernard Meisler
Poet and teacher Sharon Mesmer in conversation with Bernard Meisler.
photograph of Sharon Mesmer by Ester Levine
I always enjoy speaking with the great Sharon Mesmer, one of my favorite poets and/or people! We ...
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Review
Uncle Skallywag by Shiv Mirabito – Review
Andy Clausen & Pamela Twining
The poet carries the Universe on his shoulders (p 20).
Thus, Shiv Mirabito, in his beautiful and provocative new book, Uncle Skallywag, published by Shivastan Press in Kathmandu, Nepal, on handmade paper, leaps bravely into the fray - outsider art, renegade artists, poems and poets gone before, Ginsberg, Ira Cohen, Janine Pommy Vega, Corso, and many others.
This book is a nifty sweep of poetry influenced by Whitman, the Beats, Buddhism, Anthropological travel, thousands of movies, and rock n roll. Let’s peruse some of them.
AMERICAN VALUES, sharply satirical, is all about freedom becoming synonymous with amassing money and adoration of Self.
“I know I am the crown of creation
I have dominion over all that I see
I am totally sure
because I saw it on TV” (p13)
The eponymous UNCLE SKALLYWAG defines, outlines, and reinforces the fiercely compassionate persona of Skallywag, the friendly Outsider, the goodhear...
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Podcasts
S02E12 – Tom McGlynn
Bernard Meisler
Painter and critic Tom McGlynn in conversation with Bernard Meisler.
Tom McGlynn Mob T-Shirt copyright 1994
Tom McGlynn Small Standard 1, 36" x 36" copyright 2018
I had a good time talking to my old pal, painter ...
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Review
Max Sees Red by Martha King – Review
Jim Feast
Martha King, Max Sees Red (New York: Spuyten Duvvil, 2019)
One of the greatest mysteries of Martha King’s brilliant new novel Max Sees Red does not appear in the narrative itself but in the author’s bio at the end. It reads, “Martha King has never lived in the Hudson Valley or in Soho where this story takes place.”
The mystery is that this story, set in those two locales in 1978, paints such a vivid and detailed portrait, one with the ring of authenticity, so that until hitting this end note the reader thinks the author is using materials drawn from her own life. For instance, look at this this sharply etched description of the changing face of Hudson Valley:
As Max turned the car from the parkway … he noticed the contrast between the first two houses [he saw]. The nearest … was roofed with rusted tin. Its wooden sides were faced with odd sections of black tar paper, and shiny greenish vinyl. .. The next ho...
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Podcasts
S02E11 – J. Macon King
Bernard Meisler
Novelist, poet and publisher J. Macon King in conversation with Bernard Meisler.
I met J. Macon King last spring, when he sent in a short story I liked - he thought I lived in NYC, but to his surprise, we both lived ...
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Writing
What Life Dictates
Peter Wortsman
New neighbors. The walls are thin. The mole on her chin makes it safe to fantasize, or so I think.
“I’m Crowley,” she says, “that’s Jim.”
Jim the Psycho gives me a look that says: I’ll kill you if I ca...
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