Presto
Having worked on both sides of the temp divide, I was eager to read Presto, a flash fiction collection by Charles Rammelkamp that recounts the narrator’s many temp experiences, and the “real life” they accompanied, sometimes as foreground, sometimes as background. It’s a bemused, open-eyed journey by a young man seeking his place in the work world of several years ago, before the gig economy expanded this kind of work to encompass an entire sector of society.
Good Housekeeping
Whether you enjoy them or not, chores and errands are a part of life. Most of these tasks are completed with the purpose of maintaining some kind of home. However, home is such an important place that we rarely think about it. This is the place where we eat, sleep, raise our kids, store our most cherished belongings, practice our religion, and more. Thus, it is a place that must be maintained. But because we are so often in our home, it is difficult to consider its broader meanings and implications. In his new chapbook Good Housekeeping, Bruce E. Whitacre offers a space in which to meditate on the various visions of home.
If This Isn’t Love
Telenovelas, like cockroaches, will probably always be with us. These passion-filled soap operas from Latin markets have been a staple of pop culture—spoofs on SNL, fandom gone mad in Naples, where according to the New York Times, figurines of characters from “Mare Fuori” (“Beyond the Sea”) are becoming a standard part of the famous Neapolitan creche market. Their followings are so loyal and so large they may be the last refuge of scripted television.
Susana H. Case frames her most recent book, If This Isn’t Love, with thirteen poems devoted to the telenovela. Being a fellow poet on the New York reading circuit and familiar with her recent books, I know Case frequently uses real-life phenomenon as a skeleton in her books. For example, her most recent collection, The Damage Done, is a gripping sequence of poems tracing the life of a fictional victim of 1960’s FBI COINTELPRO corruption. It reads like a thriller. Her fondness for noir and the seasoned truth-telling of been-there-done-that is modulated in this book by a lively humor, a wider warmth, making it a smart, entertaining, and moving collection.
Travelers on My Route
As I write this review it is that fantastical time known as the holiday season, that brief window of weeks at the end of the year which contains a few scattered days of celebration and other days that are just useful excuses for rest and recuperation. As so many of us spend these days with family, this can also be a good time to reflect on where we are in the life cycle. We may look out at dinner at aging parents, competitive siblings, loving partners, and screaming children and wonder how we got here and what could be next. These are the kinds of questions Carolyn Raphael sets out to explore in her new collection of poems, Travelers on My Route.
Dancing Mockingbird
Like so many, I spent much of the pandemic indoors. As a rather introverted writer, I must admit that this wasn’t difficult for me. In fact, after a few weeks it became all too easy to remain at home surrounded by the screens of both work and leisure. Eventually I came to miss not only the social connections I had been neglecting, but also my connection to nature.
In Those Years, No One Slept
In our modern era, a lot of people wonder what the purpose of literature is, perhaps even questioning the relevance of art in general. In a world with so many social problems and so many other ways to stay distracted, why devote time to a poem by Wallace Stevens or a novel by Virginia Woolf? But I think literature is actually the opposite of a distraction, it forces us to confront deeply the social, political, economic, ecological, and moral issues that ensnare our daily lives.
Presto Change-o: Poet and Author Charles Rammelkamp Flips Through Jobs With Little Luck but Much Wit
There is no paucity of western writers— essayists, poets and troubadours—who chronicle the joys and challenges of the working life. Work is how we sustain life, or most of us, anyway, so it is no small wonder that so many, from the likes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Elizabeth Barret Browning, Dylan Thomas to Carl Sandburg, have impressively pressed their pens into the ink of this topic.