Month: November 2014

[REVIEW] The Amado Women by Désirée Zamorano

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amado

Cinco Puntos Press
240 pages, $16.95

 

Review by Anjali Enjeti

 

In The Amado Women, an absorbing debut novel, author Désirée Zamorano portrays the complicated relationships between mothers and daughters, wives and husbands, and three sisters who have one another’s backs in the worst of times, even if they irritate one another in the best of times.

Set in 2001 in southern California, this fresh, poignant tale of four women exudes, in perfect balance, strength and vulnerability, betrayal and loyalty. Mercedes (“Mercy”), the sixty-year old matriarch and her three daughters Celeste, Sylvia and Nataly are ambitious, intelligent women whose familial bond is at times both brittle and resilient. Continue reading →

Work: Sustaining the Arts

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Exploring issues of sustainability in the arts.

–by Scott Pinkmountain

Practice

Part 3: The Ocean

Even beyond this deep level of the mine, there are convoluted passageways that seem to go on forever and ever. They’ll be hidden or inaccessible at first, but the more familiar you are with this fundamental territory, the more comfortable you become. Your eyes, so to speak, adjust to the light, your lungs and blood adjust to the pressure and depth. You are accustomed enough with the shattering beauty and profundity of the infinite-seeming object that you can afford yourself a look around for something else. You gain enough trust in yourself and that unnamable other to relax just a little bit.

If you follow any one of these passageways down, unfathomably deep, eventually it will lead to a great cavernous cistern. As you work your way out the very end of what you might still perceive of as “your” mine, you’ll find a dark cool cave containing a vast, horizon-less ocean that flickers with the reflection of some invisible sun. Continue reading →

Virtual Book Tour: Man of Clay, by CL Bledsoe

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Today is the second day of CL Bledsoe’s virtual book tour celebrating Man of Clay, a novel with elements of magical realism and a dash of steampunk. This funny, engaging story redefines what Southern Literature is capable of being. Man of Clay can be pre-ordered today!

 

EXCERPT FROM MAN OF CLAY:

I [1] had recovered [2] nearly completely by the time Master John again decided to test his flying heated air sack. It was a massive thing. The sack itself was woven of the colors of the Arkansas flag. Master John had learned through trial and error that the sack needed to be closed at the top to contain the air, in order to fully capture the lifting pressure as the hot air rose. At the base of the balloon, a sort of modified lamp sat, which, when lit, shot a two-foot high tongue of flame up into the sack, heating the air. The basket was wicker, connected with thin ropes. The basket was lined with samples of plant life and various goods he intended to trade with the Andean [3] population. Because of the weight of these things, and of the two intended passengers, the amount of heated air needed was tremendous, necessitating the air sack to be massive. It towered, higher than four or even five men standing atop each other’s shoulders. It was, likewise, the width of greater than two men with arms outstretched. The bulk of the weight came from the oil needed to maintain the flame, until Master John devised a solution to this problem. It is well known that certain naturally occurring gases are quite flammable, and Master John had managed to capture a great quantity of this gas in thickly woven bags—woven so tightly that the gas could not escape. It was this gas which fueled the flame which created the buoyancy necessary for this trip.

For his test, Master John intended to pilot the contraption with Othello [4] along to simulate the weight of Zeno [5]. All of the slaves gathered, dismissed from their tasks for the occasion. Master John and Othello climbed into the basket, which was kept down with great lead weights. The ropes connecting these were loosened, though several longer ropes were still connected, the gas was set aflame, and the air sack began to rise. The slaves ‘oood’ and ‘ahhd,’ though the basket itself rose only a few inches at first. As the flame increased, and the heat of the air grew, the basket rose, higher and higher, until a man could walk between it and the ground, which one of Mr. Winfrey’s sons [6] did. The slaves applauded this, but Master John wasn’t finished. He increased the flame, and the balloon rose higher and higher, until it was as though he and Othello were atop a great mountain. Clara Bell [7] cried out in concern, but Master John continued to raise the heated air sack. Continue reading →

Virtual Book Tour: Her Own Vietnam, by Lynn Kanter

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Today is the last stop of Lynn Kanter’s virtual book tour celebrating her new novel, Her Own Vietnam. Click the link to check out the other tour stops, each with unique content!

Could you tell me a little about the origins of Her Own Vietnam? How did you begin this work?

Like most members of the Baby Boomer generation, my youth was profoundly shaped by the war in Vietnam – and by the movement to end it. We had a military draft then, and the Vietnam war could reach into almost any American home that had a teenage son, including mine. (I have an older brother.) I was also deeply shaken in 1970 when college students peacefully protesting on their own campuses at Kent State and Jackson State were killed by uniformed troops.

Decades after the war ended, I was walking down the street one day when it struck me: What would it be like to be a regular middle-aged woman, just living your humdrum life, and have that experience in your past? To have participated in a war so hated by much of your nation that the hostility slopped over onto you and your comrades, the very people your country sent to wage the war?

How would you feel? Who would you tell? Who could ever understand what you’d been through?

To explore these questions, I began to write. I worked on Her Own Vietnam, on and off, for the next 14 years. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Broken Cage by Joseph P. Wood

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Brooklyn Arts Press

78 pages, $15.95

 

Review by Anaïs Duplan

 Now I the rower gentle on the water. Now I the water gentle / in refraction.

from  “Little Schooner”

 

I can’t help but squeal in excitement whenever I read the first two lines of Joseph P. Wood’s poem, “Little Schooner.” The poem comes late in the collection – it heads the third and final section, Part III: Old-New World – but it’s perhaps the most enthralling poem in Broken Cage, for its music and for its painful sincerity. Nevertheless, while it’s decidedly salient, “Little Schooner” is only as powerful as it is because it lives in the world that the surrounding poems bring into existence.

“Now I the rower gentle on the water.” The speaker, the rower, is alone, as he almost always is. So follows an unrelenting self-scrutiny, which the reader encounters again and again in Broken Cage. For example, in “Of Anxiety,” Wood bombards himself with unanswerable questions. “Joseph, why do you shake like an egg / in quiet, why do you pontificate to the pan / like a wife, why do you hold the pen // shaking Joseph.” He is ruthless here: while one Joseph interrogates, the other Joseph quivers, unable to respond. In “Poor Ex,” the overwhelmed speaker continues to tremble:

My hands shake like boats––tossed on the sea
into which I’m falling––Captain, my pills!––lost
among the inlets––babble-brained––morosely
my hands shake. Continue reading →

Books We Can’t Quit: Lyrical and Critical Essays by Albert Camus, 1968

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Camus

Vintage Books

384 pages, $11

 

Review by Gabriel Gilbert

 

I can’t quit Albert Camus’ lyrical essays. Better known for The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger, his lyrical essays differ in that they read more like prose poetry. I found his essays by chance around the same age Camus was when he wrote them—in my mid 20’s. What’s hard to quit is the fact that he writes in the language of someone sensing the end of youth.

Camus confesses in the preface that “there is more love in these awkward pages than in all those that have followed.” That love takes on the form of an urgent yearning for the past. Camus senses that life is fleeting, yet nothing escapes him. The sun bleached beaches and ancient Roman ruins in Tipasa—his home—serve as Camus’ muse while he struggles to catch his breath in search for that place where “his heart first opened.” His prose is biting. He contends with a world where war has robbed the young of innocence and life. His essays are underscored with a certain elegy. Continue reading →

Between the Bones

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Fragments of language and story extracted from the body

 

 

–by Temim Fruchter

 

Questions for Completion

 

Jonathan’s soul had become attached to David’s soul, and Jonathan loved him as himself.

And Jonathan said to David, “Tomorrow is the new moon, and you will be remembered, for your seat will be vacant.”

And the king sat upon his seat, as at other times, upon the seat by the wall, and Jonathan arose, and Abner sat down beside Saul, and David’s place was vacant.

–Passages from Samuel I, chapter 20

 

Does it fit?

The room is tiny with a window pressed against an alley full of pigeons. Like a box, it fills easily with the blue dark all except for one diluted slat of moon through the crack between the buildings. Two people can fit. Two people come in together from the cold. The walls bend with the sudden impact of warm on empty, the newest float of songs on the twin pillows. Two people can fit. Two people can fill this room to capacity. They don’t have to, but they can. They can eat with forks and wine glasses and red pepper and thick brown sauce on the bed between the blankets holding hands because it is the only place to eat in this room, and because it makes the winter rounder and less lonely. Two people can be four hands can be sticky fingers turning inward and then outward, paper bowls, fat steam, sauce. They can finish and lick spoons and fall asleep, full and still humming. And slowly, so slowly, the room will expand to hold them, together, and along with everything they carry. Continue reading →