This month we welcome a poet new to our pages: Colin Channer, whose work will also appear in Issue 10 (Fall 2015).
June 2015 Poetry Feature
June 7, 2015
Poetry
Review: Dart
June 1, 2015
Reviews
Book by ALICE OSWALD
Reviewed by
It’s possible to call a river an organ of speech. It has a mouth, and a source, and down the length of its body the sounds it makes go through physical transformations, changing the tones of its voice.
British poet Alice Oswald begins her book-length poem Dart by asserting this comparison between the poet’s voice and the river’s. She asserts that the people living along the Dart who lend their speech to the book’s personas function as “life-models from which to sketch out a series of characters—linking their voices into a sound-map of the river, a songline from the source to the sea… These do not refer to real people or even fixed fictions. All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings.”
This note gives just a glimpse of the complex labor of translation behind this work—one that surpasses the conventional personification of natural forms. Oswald, who spent two years recording the conversations of people who live and work on the Dart, set out to transform the voice of the river into English through the way its familiars talk.
Ask a Local: Janine Joseph, Ogden, UT
May 28, 2015
Interviews
With JANINE JOSEPH
Your name: Janine Joseph
Current city or town: Ogden, UT
How long have you lived here: August 2015 will mark my two-year anniversary here.
Notes on the Trip
May 27, 2015
Dispatches
By STEVEN MOORE
1.
After training in Mississippi we flew to the southern part of California and trained for two more weeks in the desert. After the desert it was time to move again. In Maine, middle-aged women and their kids waved flags along the ramp leading from the skyway to the terminal. They were cheering. Shaking all our hands as we moved down the ramp. There were kids, too, and the kids seemed less sure of what was happening. Like they knew that we hadn’t done anything yet to deserve this and they were confused about the cause of the praise, like I was. Or they knew exactly where we were going. And they were confused about the cause of the praise. When the refueling of our plane was completed we shook their hands again on the way out.
The Boarding School Belt
North of the Bible Belt and east of the Borscht Belt lies the Boarding School Belt. Of the 300 or so boarding schools in the U.S., 120 are in the Northeast, what might be called the Eden of American education. You know, that magical place where Andover and Exeter lead inexorably to Yale and Harvard.
Literature in a Digital Age
May 26, 2015
News and Events
Event Date:
Saturday, May 30, 2015 – 2:45pm – 3:45pm
Location:
Cole Assembly Room, Converse Hall, Amherst College
The Internet and digital technologies have been described as both a boon to literature and its death knell. What can we say in 2015 about how people write, read and listen to literary stories, poetry, experiences and opinions in the digital age? Can technology enhance our experience and appreciation of literature? How may the very definition of “literature” change in an increasingly digital age? What is the future for non-technologized methods of literary transmittal, also known as “books”?
Join David Kirkpatrick ’75, founder and CEO of Techonomy, Jim Kennedy ’75, senoir vice president of strategic planning at the Associated Press, Alicia Christoff, assistant professor of English, and Jennifer Acker ’00, founder and Editor of Chief of The Common. Presented by the Classes of 1975 and 2000.
May 30, 2015 | 2:45pm
Cole Assembly Room, Converse Hall, Amherst College
Part of Amherst College Reunion Weekend.
Review: Providence Noir
May 18, 2015
Reviews
Book by ANN HOOD, ELIZABETH STROUT, PETER FARRELLY, BRUCE DESILVA, MARIE MYUNG-OK LEE, ROBERT LEUCI, DAWN RAFFEL, LUANNE RICE, THOMAS COBB, JOHN SEARLES, TAYLOR M. POLITES, PABLO RODRIGUEZ, AMITY GAIGE, LASHONDA KATRICE BARNETT, HESTER KAPLAN
Reviewed by
Noir is not my regular genre. But I have read my fair share of Raymond Chandler, and I’ve seen The Big Sleep more than once. I’m from Brooklyn originally—Noir Central—and I’ve lived in Rhode Island for over 20 years. So I jumped at the opportunity to review Providence Noir, Brooklyn-based Akashic Books’s latest entry in its 11-year-old Noir series, atmospheric story collections set in cities all over the world.
Part of the fun of reading the series is imagining familiar landmarks in a sinister light. The appropriately mysterious cover photo of Providence Noir looks out on a deserted Dorrance Street, in the city’s old center, from an alley behind the Union Trust Company at night. The sidewalk looks wet where the streetlight falls. Might be rain, might be blood. We also see Coffee Exchange, Central High, Trinity Rep. Benefit Street, Adler’s Hardware, India Point Park. These are the places where we Providence folk overcaffeinate, or teach, or take our kids to watch A Christmas Carol. Places where we try to find parking for jury duty, pick up paint to brighten the kitchen, buy freshly made pasta, enjoy one more late summer picnic. Turned by the writers ofProvidence Noir into sites of intrigue, mayhem, and death, they make the little reptilian hairs on the back our necks rise, as if suddenly we find ourselves inside the fiction on the page.
Berlin
May 12, 2015
Dispatches
Then
it was a
place refracted
by the prism of history and
still in a kind of shock
of the past,
My Redemption at the Movies
May 11, 2015
Essays
The last thing I remember about my father was him walking away wearing his camel coat. I remember him from the back, his dark hair escaping from his hat.
It was Christmas evening and it was cold, for Rome at least. He had just accompanied me to a train, which I would take to reach my cousins in Calabria. He was not happy that I was leaving, and would die a few hours later. A stroke, the doctors said.
Friday Reads: May 2015
May 8, 2015
Reviews
