Books, poetry, comics and the literary world of Chicago
Poems published in journals today have double work to do. Because the gatekeepers are changing and the landscape is changing and the idea that social status and pedigree holding space for mediocrity is no longer accepted. So yeah, good luck on reading that incredibly tight and creatively dead piece of art—we’ll see whose soul it saves.
A graphic novelist kicks it off with some great events in April.
Chicago food blogger Emily Belden’s debut novel “Hot Mess” is a camera-ready beach read for the couch.
As Chicago’s unacknowledged laureate, since winning the National Book Award for poetry for his “Performance of Becoming Human,” Borzutzky’s work has an interesting dividing line—a reality of thought versus imagination, or poetry and politics.
She questions infatuation, attraction and nostalgia and confirms that weddings are the beginning, not the end, of love-as-commitment stories.
A story about a man reconciling that death is a ridiculous joke—“all the striving, lusting, dreaming, suffering, working, hoping, yearning, mourning, suddenly revealed itself to be an accelerating countdown to nightfall.”
Picciolini believes we are failing our children. “We need to do a better job making sure they never get to the point of feeling unsupported or marginalized.”
March reading and discussion highlights.
The selfie… a way for disempowered people to control their self-image, an anarchic antidote to structures of sexuality and money and power.
“Daphne” is a startling debut novel.
