Mastodon Sensitive Skin Magazine - Page 13 of 66 - art, stories, poetry, essays, reviews and music

COLLECTED POEMS OF BOB KAUFMAN – review

Marc Olmsted

COLLECTED POEMS OF BOB KAUFMAN edited by Neeli Cherkovski, Raymond Foye and Tate Swindell City Lights Books $19.95 The surrealism of Bob Kaufman is a true American surrealism, because Kaufman brings the blues, jazz and being a black man in the United States to his subconscious visions. He still remains, in my estimation, America's unequaled surrealist. Just as Beat's other most famous black poet, Amiri Baraka, spawned the Last Poets and the eventual rise of rap, Kaufman's influence is not only present today in Will Alexander and transmale Blackfoot poet Max Wolf Valerio, but in Bob Dylan. It was Amiri Baraka himself who coined the term Afrosurreal Expressionism in 1974 to discussing the work of Henry Dumas, and was later expanded in the Afrosurreal Manifesto by D. Scott Miller. Afrosurrealism is now considered a very active movement, with a wide pantheon that now considers Ted Joans and Samuel R. Delany among its members. ...
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There’s Never Been A Better Time To Die

Bernard Meisler

Sensitive Skin Books is proud to present THERE'S NEVER BEEN A BETTER TIME TO DIE, a noir/mystery/crime novel/comedy/satire of late-stage capitalism, as seen through the eyes of a real estate agent in Marin County, who accidentally becomes a hard-boiled detective. The novel takes place in Marin County, CA, 2008, just before the bubble burst. Once the home to the Grateful Dead, Gary Snyder and Sam Shepard, the newer demographic tends toward hedge fund managers, dotcom millionaires and trophy wives, where people, without any sense of irony, paste "Keep Tahoe Blue" bumper stickers on their gigantic SUVs. Despite widespread affluence, conspicuous consumption and a massive sense of entitlement, there is an undercurrent of fear among the residents—of a downturn causing them to lose it all, their kids drinking or taking drugs (or murdering an Italian policeman while on vacation in Europe), of falling behind their neighbors, of getting foun...
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The Last Poet of the Village

Sergei Yesenin

Sensitive Skin is proud to present The Last Poet of the Village, a bilingual (Russian/English) edition of selected poems by the perhaps the greatest 20th-century Russian poet, Sergei Yesenin, translated by acclaimed Russian-American poet Anton Yakovlev, with prefaces by Yakovlev and Donald Zirilli. Sergei Yesenin (1895-1925), whose distinctive lyricism and lush rural imagery have indelibly imprinted themselves into the Russian consciousness, is second in popularity among Russian speakers only to Alexander Pushkin. Sadly, Yesenin has received surprisingly little attention abroad, where he is best known for his brief marriage to Isadora Duncan. This bilingual edition (original Russian side-by-side with translation by Anton Yakovlev) is an attempt to rectify the relative scarcity of Yesenin’s English translations and to introduce English speakers to many of his most beloved and iconic poems. Four sample poems from the book are now ...
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