The Invention of Love
I’m thinking about death. I am thinking about love. I am thinking about death and love, intertwining. This is what happens to your brain when you read Sara Schaff’s newest book, The Invention of Love. Opposites attract and mix and slyly become one another in the perspective of the wry and self-effacing narrator of the title story.
Friday Night Knife & Gun Club: Episodes 1-5
For a while now I have held the position that for an American college (or better yet high school) student to graduate it should be required that they spend at least a few weeks abroad. Traveling away from one’s home country provides a priceless perspective on that country’s culture, economy, and politics. For instance, in my travels I learned that even though Hollywood is in the U.S. it is certainly debatable whether American movies are the best; that there are other countries in the world where it is simply more affordable for an average worker to live; and that in some cases our foreign policy has done real damage across the globe. American insularity is partly to blame for the myriad crises pushing our country to the tipping point. In her fiction series Friday Night Knife and Gun Club, Linda Collison chronicles these crises with a true love for pulp.
The Elsewhere
There are so many different kinds of poets in the world. This seems like a rather obvious statement, but it is also something we often forget. There are poets of different schools and sensibilities, of different educations and obsessions. A book of collected or selected poems can be a revealing omnibus, charting a poet’s path, perhaps from its earliest stages. Such a book can be quite gripping if it is curated well, following an artist through the myriad joys and struggles of their life while also reaching into the life of a reader in some way. The Elsewhere by Philip Brady is a career-spanning book of selected poems and essays written in a unique voice.
The Messerschmidt Poems
Over the years, a surplus of art historians, doctors, and psychologists, have scratched their heads over the interpretation of the Character Heads from the German sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783). They have suggested that the busts were the result of the artist’s alleged schizophrenia, or perhaps their creation was triggered by hallucinations. Some experts have even suggested physical ailments, such as Crohn’s Disease, may have contributed to the artist’s creativity. No one knows for sure.
Beat Scrapbook
Next month will mark my sixth anniversary as a reviewer for At The Inkwell. I must confess that of all the books I’ve reviewed during that time, I was most excited to read BEAT Scrapbook. Like other millennials, the Beat generation greatly influenced my youth.
The Many Uses of Mint
After reading Ravi Shankar’s latest poetry collection, The Many Uses of Mint, I was reminded of the words from George Orwell writing after World War II: “One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language….” This sounds eerily familiar with our current state of the world. We need our poets. I think Ravi Shankar is one of the best. His vocabulary is vast. His words are sewn together like a professionally tailored suit. He has much to teach us about life if only we have the patience and courage to listen.
Clerk of the Dead
As I write this, America is undergoing great political uncertainty. My wife and I are checking in with each other every fifteen minutes or so about the latest vote counts in states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. This week I have frequently found myself refreshing news websites waiting for the big reveal, the epic climax of a long and hard-fought election. This has not been particularly healthy. Therefore, it was something of a treat to read Alan Perry’s Clerk of the Dead, a chapbook about the small or dying things we often ignore in the course of major events.