The notion that “the medium is the message” is attributed to Marshall McLuhan, but the folks at Rose Metal Press seek to marry the media to the message with their individually designed, beautifully custom-printed editions of what they describe as “hybrid genres.” The result is books that could seem pricey and precious were it not for the fact that that they offer a perfect match to the right readers. The Brookline, Massachusetts-based (with a strong Chicago presence due to its co-founder’s local residence) publisher’s books aren’t for everyone, and that’s the point: they don’t need to be, considering each so gloriously fits its own highly personal niche.

Consider the appropriately retro fifties packaging of Tiff Holland’s linked short-short stories, at the center of which is a judgmental, far-from-perfect working-class mom dubbed Betty Superman, whose chief “super” virtue may be honesty to the point of bluntness. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Lawrence Welsh’s collection “Begging for Vultures” is a muscular, sometimes menacing antidote to the anemic chapbooks by which some poetry is dribbled as tightfistedly as rain on the Southwest borderland. His poems are likewise not niggardly but rather generous and humane, sometimes chiseled as if on a mesa, then rapping with word play, proof of a virtuoso at the top of his game.

Befitting a first-generation Irish American who uprooted himself from L.A. to occupy El Paso two decades ago, his works manifest the mixture of hope and resignation required to claw purchase where “the lease is over / the dreams locked in / how the west was won,” an arid border where ghost towns populated by living apparitions sustained by booze, drugs and Saturday nights is the gateway through which illegals chase their hope, “men running along / the river / the coyotes a long way / from home” (“Myth”).  Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

William Carlos Williams lived his whole life in New Jersey, became a much-loved doctor who delivered thousands of babies, hung out with that fascist Ezra Pound and, incidentally, revolutionized American poetry. Not in a wishy-washy way, either, but truthfully, and with the simple maxim “no ideas but in things.” Two of his poems, “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “This is Just to Say,” are often held up for praise in earnest college poetry classes, easy to both parody and love, but for those of us who cherished those eager, bright-eyed discussions in class, well, wouldn’t it be great if you could talk to your blue-collar dad about those poems at Thanksgiving?  Or your bus driver, or your co-workers at whatever stodgy job you ended up with when your college degree let you down? Read the rest of this entry »

By Mike Gillis

Out in the suburb of River Forest—in an apartment complex housing the last remaining literary journal dedicated to light verse—is a living metaphor. Like the flickering form of light verse itself, the office of Light Quarterly is filled with both relics and curiosities: A cylinder of enchanted “Indian House Blessing.” Shelves of books torn in half by age. A cardboard box crammed with rubber-band-bound notecards on which founder John Mella wrote a novel during his thirty-two years working for the Postal Service.

Even more interesting are hundreds of letters to celebrities, stacked in plastic mail crates. Solicitation letters, to be exact, going out to the likes of the Dalai Lama and Conan O’Brien.

When asked if Light Quarterly has ever received a response, Mella, at sixty-nine years, smiles, his face suddenly illuminated. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Alice Friman’s “Vinculum” embraces the internal, the deep inside, the emotional interior as it interacts with our biological makeup. A “vinculum,” the horizontal line that appears between two numbers that are being divided, or to indicate repeating digits in a decimal, can also be translated as a “bond” or “tie” between two ideas. Friman’s attempt at creating a connective tissue between her poems is so successful that often individual poems fold back into themselves, each moment relating and recreating another.

“Vinculum” seems to work with three major concepts: the body, the location, the emotional moment or instance. In almost all of the poems there is an interaction between these that gives the reader a strong, multidimensional experience. Read the rest of this entry »

Marc Smith

By Mike Gillis

If slam poetry is still the religion it once was, then the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge is its cathedral. Of course, like the best of lounges, the Green Mill is the opposite of a church. Rather than natural light and sanctity, it conjures sea grottos, manmade dimness, embellished curves.

On a recent Saturday in Wrigleyville, the rock club Metro served as a surrogate to slam poetry founder Marc Smith’s traditional pulpit. It served quite well. If a little less cavernous, the Metro was no less ornate and grotesquely organic than the Green Mill. Should the low-key ambiance have suggested slam has lost its edge, though, the pantheon assembled for the twenty-fifth anniversary of slam poetry immediately extinguished such doubts. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In a sweeping 200-plus poem collection, G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher tackle an undeniably complicated, expansive subject: this American life. Written collaboratively between a year of back-and-forth emails, “Your Father on the Train of Ghosts” slips fluidly from topic to topic, from the interior of a house (“…and what do we have to show for it / around the dinner table, or the sound like a dinner table”), to the exterior: parkways and botanical gardens, chapels and hospitals.

The book begins with “Automated Town,” a poem which lists a number of familiar situations, people and places suddenly made new by their interactions with each other, and with the determined voice writing them into the poetic landscape. It is this voice, among the mass of American voices it represents, that was most consistent and illuminating.

It’s a room of people dressed
in bright clothes. It’s a room of hanging doors.
Of cell phones and one is ringing. Of people having sex.
Rows of bottles of vodka. Rows of
sparklers. We could go on like this for some time,
so we do. Bugs are flying in and out of the open
windows. All the TVs are on. Read the rest of this entry »

The Poetry Foundation has a mission to celebrate poetry and present it to the largest possible audience. Almost a hundred years since its inception in 1912 as Poetry magazine, the foundation carries on these principles by providing poetry a new home when its new public building opens this month.

“Designing a building from the ground up just for poetry was a huge opportunity,” says Poetry Foundation president John Barr. The two-story building, a 22,000-square-foot structure, is one of only three public spaces in the nation built for the advancement of poetry. The location will include the offices of the foundation and magazine, along with a multipurpose performance space acoustically designed for the spoken word, a public garden, a library holding a collection of 30,000 volumes, and an exhibition gallery. The structure’s aesthetics were an important part of the design. Local architect John Ronan, Barr says, “took one art form, poetry, and translated it into another one, architecture.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

As the title suggests, Polish poet Adam Zagajewski’s new book “Unseen Hand” is a book of hidden things. By this, we mean the poems move in and out of revealing and concealing, each poem an elegant exploration of history, both personal and global.

Splitting his time between Chicago and Krakow, Zagajewski’s poetry reflects on the unseen impressions we leave on each other and the physical world around us, the indirect intimacy of human interaction. In his poem, “Joseph Street,” he writes:

Years pass, I remain, memory is uncertain,
unheard prayers lie underfoot,
sparrows are eternity’s frail emblem,
the rain is only recollection, the silhouettes
of unknown persons walk without casting shadows.

This kind of quiet observation of “remembering,” the actual act of, allows readers  to insert themselves emotionally into the international but often familiar landscapes that Zagajewski carefully details. His engagement with simplicity, with unnoticed or overlooked beauty, seems to be at the root of “Unseen Hand.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

We all know the story of the boy who could fly. He came late one night looking for his shadow, then took the girl Wendy, the boy John and the baby Michael with help from pixie dust and happy thoughts to a world of adventure where they’d never grow old.

Jenny Boully’s “Not Merely Because of the Unknown that was Stalking Toward Them” has been described as a dark re-envisioning of J.M. Barrie’s “Peter and Wendy,” “a ‘deliciously creepy’ swan song from Wendy Darling to Peter Pan” in which Boully seethes her text with feelings untouched upon by Barrie’s own prose. Did Peter thimble Tiger Lily, Wendy may wonder; when he loves as ferociously as he fights, is it for real or make-believe? Is Tinker Bell’s pining justly so because she will only live and die and be forgotten?

To delve into Boully’s work is to dive with faith from the plank—to jump, with hope and belief and a wish to see what the author has given us: a fresh, imaginative look at a tale as ageless as Peter himself. You must, when reading the work, “dispel every other thought,” as Calvino would say. You must find yourself in a locked room, perhaps on a couch, perhaps in the bath (to dream of mer-creatures), or perhaps almost prostrate in bed with wide and absorbing eyes. You must be willing to fly yourself. Read the rest of this entry »