News & Notes | Tarpaulin Sky Magazine
News & Notes | Tarpaulin Sky Magazine
IMAGE: NOAH SATERSTROM
Nicholas Mosley’s “Metamorphosis” Reviewed by Michael Mejia
Shows the now 92-year-old author still more than capable of walking the edges of innovative narrative while at the same time plumbing the moral depths he's been concerned with for more than 60 years.
A Tribute to the Late Stephen Rodefer by Martin Corless-Smith
Famously generous, a mooch, irascible, seductive, crass, subtle, childish, erudite, contemptuous of bourgeois manners, and yet at times a snob; from money, but almost a tramp at times, he was soft company, and he was hard company. He caused trouble and he made peace.
Tom Williams’ “Among the Wild Mulattos” Reviewed by Matthew Kirkpatrick
Among the Wild Mulattos isn’t simply a book about biracial identity: it's also a look into the subtleties of difference, and it masterfully charts personal landscapes with humor, empathy, and wonder.
Marina Zurkow’s “The Petroleum Manga” Reviewed by Michael McLane
A catalog of petrochemicals assessed and personalized by nearly three dozen writers might seem like an unlikely theme to center a collection around, but this is exactly what Marina Zurkow curates in her unnerving and eerily charming project, The Petroleum Manga.
Ander Monson’s “Letter to a Future Lover” Reviewed by Kelly Lydick
An odyssey of linguistic complexity, your book, Letter to a Future Lover, appears to me as part catalog of experience, part treatise, and part question, a compendium of letters and errata, proof that we read and write to understand life.
Melanie Jordan’s “Hallelujah for the Ghosties” Reviewed by Barbara Duffey
Through multiple readings, I come back to continued ambiguities that refuse to reconcile themselves, and that’s the paradox at the heart of Jordan's poetic project: a system of “personal abstractions” that are emotionally poignant, intellectually complex, and physically and sonically beautiful.
Juliana Spahr’s That Winter the Wolf Came, reviewed by Jeff T. Johnson
"the world we have is not the world we want and these books know that, even while they also know love and communion even if the commune is always always fleeting."
Brian Henry’s Static & Snow, reviewed by Laura Carter
"[With] terse lines and images of severe desolation that compel it forward, Henry sings a song that is deeply moving.... I think this may be what he was after, but it’s impossible to know entirely. Unless one backs away from the snow, entirely. Or does something to subvert it, as he has done here, and done well."
Commune Editions’ First Three Titles reviewed by David W. Pritchard
David W. Pritchard reviews Commune Editions' first three titles: Jasper Bernes, We Are Nothing and So Can You; Joshua Clover, Red Epic; Juliana Spahr, That Winter the Wolf Came. "At this point we have to destroy everything or let it destroy us."
What I’m Reading Now… by Andrew Seguin
Andrew Seguin on Elizabeth Bishop, Leonard Gardner, Yannis Ritsos, and Keith Waldrop, as well as Fred Moten's "whopping music of language."
What I’m Reading Now… by Shane McCrae
Shane McRae discusses "style" in poetry, via Swinburne, Helen Vendler, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, Derek Walcott, Jeff Dolven, and Aase Berg.
What I’m Reading Now… by Rikki Ducornet
Rikki Ducornet with a short list of recommended books by Juan Pimentel, James Baldwin, Alia Malek, Tim Low, and Marwa Al Sabouni.
What I’m Reading Now… by Erin Moure
Erin Moure on Bertrand Laverdure’s Readopolis, Robert Majzels’s City of Forgetting, Louky Bersianik’s Maternative, Uxío Novoneyra’s Os Eidos, and Lupe Gómez's Camuflaxe.
What I’m Reading Now… by Ely Shipley
Ely Shipley on books by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Jennifer Firestone, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Eduardo Kohn, and Joseph Tafur, MD, with shoutouts to Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Ching-In Chen, Duriel E. Harris, and Orlando White.
Fox Frazier-Foley’s “Like Ash In The Air After Something Has Burned” Reviewed By Jasmine An
"Frazier-Foley unflinchingly points out humans’ capacity for cruelty, and the realities of gendered violence that are still familiar to many of us in the present day. Yet, even as the body falls prey to the bodies of others, the voices of these poems press on, seeking in their own bodily dissolution/evolution what they were denied in flesh."