Formation
On June 24, 1947, small businessman and hobbyist pilot Kenneth Arnold was on a business flight in his CallAir A-2 Mountain plane, when he saw something. An unnameable thing. What becomes the topic and title of Brooklyn poet Matthew Bialer’s epic poem, Formation.
In terse and clipped three and four word lines, bundled mostly in couplets and tercets and occasion longer stanzas, Bialer delivers up a narrative poem that traces events from the middle of the last century surrounding the origins of the phrase “flying saucer”. The New York-based literary agent, well-known street photographer, watercolorist and author of eleven previous books from such prestigious presses as Coffee House, effectively uses repetition and imagistic description, artfully (and interestingly) combined with a quasi-journalistic research of the topic. He has located both official and anecdotal materials recording these events from all sorts of sources and in the book he recounts various versions of these mysterious sightings.
Wandering In My Mind
Ah, the poetry chapbook. These mini-books, often between fifteen and thirty five pages, can be a delicate reminder of what we love, a toe-dip in the pool of a specific writer’s relationship with language. Often they are themed; they tend to have a preciousness. They fit well in even the smallest of purses. They offer up poetic hors d’oeuvres. Tasty imagistic nuggets.
Now, forget everything I wrote above. This summer I met a chapbook that, despite its scant twenty-four pages and the most delicate of covers– a 19th century botanical illustration of plant and bird– is meaty and substantial, a sensual and narrative feast that satisfies, rather than teases, the reader. In Wandering in My Mind, Michigan poet Laura Smyth parses nature in all its grandeur, and the place she has witnessed it intersecting with humanity, whether her loved ones or strangers.
In My Neighborhood
In My Neighborhood by Giovanna Capone is a book about families and their inevitable distances. Whether they are the families we are born into or the families we find as adults, distances are either resolved or created through these kinships. These are the distances that Giovanna Capone traverses as she seeks a neighborhood of greater connection.
That crazy thing called love: The Hypothetical Girl
Approaching someone you’re attracted to can make some people sweat compulsively. Others close up like a clam and become the creepy wierdo women talk about the next morning with their girlfriends, while some are too scared to even say hello.
And so we retreat behind the screen thinking it would make this dating thing easier. But the digital realm is just as complex as it is face to face.
In The Hypothetical Girl, Elizabeth Cohen brilliantly weaves a collection of mistaken attraction, vanity at its worse, stalking, loneliness, and secret fetishes. It is anything but those cheesy I met my wife/husband/partner/lover online fairytales (although there are some happy endings). It’s the stories that make us human in all our ugliness and beauty.
Celebrity Villains: Lee Bacon’s Joshua Dread gains international notoriety
Lee Bacon is standing on the platform waiting for a late train in Munich. This is unusual, as trains in Germany are known for being impeccably punctual.
While waiting, Bacon thinks of the opening for his first children’s book, “Our class got out of sixth period early the day my parents tried to flood the earth.”
Coincidentally, Joshua Dread (Delacorte Press, 2012), the story of a 12-year-old boy who discovers his parents are villains and he also has superpowers, is now being translated into German. The book will also be published in Australia, France, Israel, and New Zealand.
“I was so focused on just getting my book published in America,” said Bacon, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. “That really feels like icing on the cake.”
Lily Steps Out
My mother once told me that if I ever marry, make sure I have my own money. Nothing lasts forever and people always change, she warned. Such wisdom rings true in Lily Steps Out by Rita Plush.
When Lily Gold’s retired husband Leon has a heart attack, the 55-year-old Jewish mother is shaken with the reality that she wouldn’t know what to do with herself if he had died. A dutiful wife of more than thirty years with a successful son, Lily wants a legacy of her own, outside of the home.
The Gin Lovers
mages of decadent lifestyles, mass-culture, a burgeoning sexual revolution, and underground speakeasies. Jamie Brenner’s The Gin Lovers captures the Victorian era’s illusion of glamour and its harsh realities.