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Archive for April, 2011

Sunnyoutside 52 pages, $13.00   I want to look at two poems from this collection, “I found out over coffee, a danish, and a donut” and “burn.” Together, I think they can stand for the whole, or give readers a sense of what else they might encounter if they were to purchase this book. 1. “I [...]

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I was listening to Sufjan Stevens’ song “I Walked” on his new album The Age of Adz when it occurred to me how much in keeping his work is with the project of Romanticism. Like the Romantics, Sufjan is alienated from the values of the culture into which he happened to be born. He is [...]

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Magic Helicopter Press, 32 pages, $5.00 Many whiles ago a copy of this chapbook arrived in the mail, with a tiny little piece of notebook paper (complete with frayed left-hand edge from being ripped from a spiral binding), and on this piece of paper, a personal note from Evelyn herself. It appears that Evelyn hand-typed [...]

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If you’ve been following along with us here at Big Other, you know that in January we read and discussed Tom McCarthy’s C (more here and here), followed that up with Mary Caponegro’s The Complexities of Intimacy (more here, here, and here) and Manuel Puig’s Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (more here, here, here, and here), [...]

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And no, not just because I’m going to be there.  (Though I would be very pleased to see you, of course. I might even buy you a beer, if you asked very nicely.)  But because a whole bunch of amazing people and workshops and panels and magazines and DC area writers and other neat things [...]

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Okay, I know, weekends are terrible times to post things on the Internet, and apologies to the Big Other crew for posting like twenty million things in one day. But, moving on:  I’ve been meaning to buy Prathna Lor’s little chapbook from Future Tense for a while, but it wasn’t until I went to the [...]

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Over the past few weeks, I’ve written a lot here about “Contemporary Verse Novels” and concluded with the idea that a contemporary verse novel is, like the prose poem, subversive. If the prose poem is subversive to prose and poetry, then it is also true that a verse novel is subversive to verse and novels. [...]

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I’ll never know why some poems stand out to me more than others, or why I’m drawn to certain themes more than others, but the two poems that really did something for me in this book are “The Smell of Hay” and “The Cure.” 1. The Smell of Hay “The Smell of Hay” opens like [...]

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“Dining Room” from Selah Saterstrom’s The Pink Institution (Coffee House, 2004): “Willie called his daughters into the dining room. He picked up a dining room table chair and threw it into a closed window. The window shattered. He said, ‘That’s a lesson about virginity. Do you understand?’ to which they replied, ‘Yes sir.’” Okay, wow, [...]

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This book undoes a lot of the anxiety I have as someone who has to read a lot of poetry and has yet to discover more than two or three books of poems that I actually like and would want to read again. Does that sounds shitty and ignorant? I mean it, though. And this [...]

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Please welcome Paula Bomer to Big Other. Paula Bomer is the author of Baby and Other Stories (Word Riot Press, 2010). Her fiction has appeared in dozens of journals and anthologies, including Open City, Fiction, The Mississippi Review, Nerve and elsewhere. She grew up in South Bend, Indiana and now lives in New York. Find [...]

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I’ve read about Dan Chaon and possibly have read other stories by him (because I’ve read many journals over many years, and he’s widely published in lit mags), but I recently purchased the collection, Among the Missing. I had read an interview and something he said, and I’m paraphrasing here — “I don’t understand how [...]

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