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 [...]
Archive for April, 2011
Sentences and Fragments: Brian McGettrick’s EVERYTHING ELSE WE MUST ENDURE
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Brian McGettrick, Brutal Relationship, Chinese Burn, domesticity, Everything Else We Must Endure, Hangover, Mistakes, Poems I can understand, Sunnyoutside, Unkind Relationship on April 4, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
From the Barbaric Heart: Sufjan Stevens’ Vengeful Play
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Age of Adz, Beethoven, Jimi Hendrix, Nina Hagen, Plato, Plotinus, Romanticism, Shelley, Sufjan Stevens, sun ra, William Blake on April 4, 2011 | 4 Comments »
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 [...]
Sentences and Fragments: Evelyn Hampton’s WE WERE ETERNAL AND GIGANTIC
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Cell Fish, Evelyn Hampton, Evelyn is awesome, Haircuts, How to keep a plant alive, Poetry is cool, We Were Eternal and Gigantic on April 4, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
Reading Stanley Elkin’s Searches and Seizures: On “The Bailbondsman”
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged "The Art of Fiction", “The Bailbondsman”, Big Other, Henry James, John Madera, Searches and Seizures, Stanley Elkin, William Gass on April 4, 2011 | 15 Comments »
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), [...]
Conversations and Connections in DC: Ten Reasons You Should be There.
Posted in Uncategorized on April 4, 2011 | 2 Comments »
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 [...]
Sentences and Fragments: Prathna Lor’s VENTRILOQUISM and Myriam Gurba’s WISH YOU WERE ME
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged anorexia, birds, bitch grandma, Books are stupid, cocks, English classes, herpes, I hate reading, kings, Myriam Gurba, Poetry sucks, Prathna Lor, Ventriloquism, Wish You Were Me on April 3, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
Sentences and Fragments: “Your Borders, Your Rivers, Your Tiny Villages” by Amy Bloom
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Amy Bloom, Cheating Spouses, Extramarital Affairs, How to hook a reader, Incest, Lionel and Julia, Opening Sentences, Sentences and Fragments, Stepmother sleeps with stepson, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, William and Clare on April 3, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
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. [...]
Sentences and Fragments: “The Smell of Hay” and “The Cure” by Carl Phillips
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Carl Phillips, I hate poetry, Poetry is confusing, Riding Westward, Tercets, The Smell of Hay on April 2, 2011 | 2 Comments »
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 [...]
Contemporary Verse Novels: The Anxiety of Reading Poems and Kimiko Hahn’s THE UNBEARABLE HEART
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Contemporary Verse Novels, I hate poetry, Kimiko Hahn, Poems are Confusing, poetry, The Unbearable Heart on April 2, 2011 | 3 Comments »
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 [...]
Our Newest Contributor!
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Big Other, Paula Bomer on April 1, 2011 | 7 Comments »
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 [...]
On Reading Dan Chaon’s “Falling Backwards” and Mary Gaitskill’s “The Arms and Legs of the Lake”: An Essay on Compassion
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Dan Chaon, Mary Gaitskill on April 1, 2011 | 8 Comments »
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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Nick Francis Potter
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