YouTube Pleasures April 17, 2008: Angela Rawlings in Reykjavik, Iceland, 2007: (more...) by Linh Dinh

Trickster Johnson April 15, 2008: "Kent Johnson" Best known for the Araki Yasusada incident, Kent Johnson is a deadly serious, brilliant subversive. "I am in awe of you," I emailed him recently, and I meant it. Johnson's soon-to-be-released book, Homage to the Last Avant Garde, begins with a prefatory fuck you, thank you poemette to Kenneth Koch, then an inventively bizarre [...] by Linh Dinh

Parable April 15, 2008: I’ve noticed that on the east side of Central Park in New York, above the zoo but below the Met, there are two playgrounds, one of which is a mommy playground and the other of which is a nanny playground. To a Philadelphian, this seems pretty twisted, but I guess that’s what happens when you make up a whole city out of Midwesterners and [...] by Daisy Fried

Malicious Feelgood April 15, 2008: “All kids do today is play video games,” rants my neighbor Stace, out on her steps with her kid Little Stace. She’s bleeding from the bare space between her brows where she overplucks. “She can’t even jump rope, can you believe it?” In Stace’s window is an O’Bama sign, the Irish-American Barack Obama one, with a shamrock as an [...] by Daisy Fried

Ooga-Booga April 15, 2008: It has gotten harder and harder to write well about Iraq and the current administration. One feels helpless, and furious. One jeers not to weep or become apathetic. But none of these responses makes for good poetry. Politics tends toward sloganeering, solutioneering, and declarations of right and wrong; good poems generally require ambivalence [...] by Daisy Fried

Impressionable Flesh Speaking April 14, 2008: "Those impressions are dear to him and no doubt he hoards them imperceptibly, and even unconsciously. How and why, of course, he does not know either. He may suddenly, after hoarding impressions for many years, abandon everything and go off to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage for his soul's salvation, or perhaps he will suddenly set fire to his native [...] by Linh Dinh

Who Can I Be Now? April 13, 2008: In the interstices of being horribly sick (this was another chemotherapy week, with the usual panoply of crushing exhaustion, constant diarrhea, intermittent attacks of abdominal pain, continual nausea, and serial vomiting), I have been thinking about Lin Dinh’s fascinating recent Harriet post “Our Bodies, Our Selves,”? which begins by [...] by Reginald Shepherd

Turquoise Dress April 12, 2008: Snapshot from my neighborhood: A man walks by with a little girl. Tan skin, red lips, dark eyes, turquoise flowered sundress. Spring comes to Philly! She’s not his daughter, she’s his girlfriend’s daughter. He has white pants; you think you can see his legs through the fabric when the sun’s a certain way behind him but it’s an illusion. [...] by Daisy Fried

Joseph Torra’s Call Me Waiter April 12, 2008: Joseph Torra Taxes (a year’s worth of receipts to sort out and tally up), poems I’m trying to write, a day-long gig up in North Jersey, Maisie’s 15 month checkup, laziness because it’s finally spring: My excuses for not posting for over a week. I read though, and particularly liked Joseph Torra’s new “autobiographical novel,” Call [...] by Daisy Fried

Online Intimacies April 7, 2008: I’m sure this isn’t a novel observation, but I am often struck by how differently people interact online and in person. Though people are capable of both shocking cruelty and viciousness and amazing generosity and kindness, in general face-to-face interactions are guided and moderated by social norms and mores, some of which are purely [...] by Reginald Shepherd