Essays

Diane Simmons

Diane Simmons

There must be thousands of us non-Southerners with similar secret histories, people who profited from the crime of slavery and continue to do so.

Siegfried Mortkowitz

Because he wanted all the attention at the funeral, all the condolences, all the pity. The big man in sorrow. Jakob weeping.

Marina Porras

They are women who want to look into the mirror and be satisfied with their reflection. Envy is born when you look into the mirror and don’t like what you see there. Everything about this sin begins with the eyes.

Blue Diode Press | Publisher’s Story

“There is little financial reward in publishing poetry but a great deal of satisfaction” – Rob A. Mackenzie on the origins and history of Blue Diode Press

Death of the Artists: Marinetti’s Last Stand

This Marinetti on his second and final trip to Russia was less like one of the early figures of punk than a bloated 70s rock dinosaur living on past glory and greed. Instead of cocaine he had fascism, and just like the rock megastars with their producers and managers he had the backing of a bald, fat megalomaniac.

Parnaz Foroutan

APPARITIONS   I. Once upon a time, there was a woman who lost her son. She sent him off, in the care of some men

Christopher Fahey: Nurtured Forms

Christopher Fahey Nurtured Forms November 9 to December 7 Java Project Greenpoint, Brooklyn Nature and nurture, nebulous forces that shape us. Christopher Fahey’s biomorphic sculptures

Siegfried Mortkowitz

SEX AND THE HOLOCAUST   I’ve been masturbating for as long as I can remember. Sometimes it seems that I came out of the womb

Ryan Scott

  LIFE INUNDATING ART: KNAUSGÅRD BRINGS HIS LENGHTY STRUGGLE TO AN END     WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW, so the famous edict goes. And read?

Stanley Plumly

GERMANS There are eleven of them. Why I remember the exact number is uncertain, perhaps because it’s enough to field a football team. They arrive

Cherise Oakley

  HARD WAX   I pull into the Elizabeth Wende Breast Care facility in Brighton, shut off my car and walk in the doors. This

M. J. Arlett

  CLEARING THE THROAT   I used to cox. Hours on the water calling cadence and strokes. Guiding the boat’s body, guiding the rudder, guiding

Joshua Weiner: Berlin Alexanderplatz, April 2016

  The following essay is an excerpt from Joshua Weiner’s Berlin Notebook (available on Amazon) out now from the Los Angeles Review of Books _______________________________________________________________________

The Future of Genius

  By Robert Archambeau If one were to shout the question “who is a literary genius?” in the general direction of a gaggle of young

Knud Sønderby

  THE BLACK SWAN           — Translated from the Danish by Michael Goldman   Red at the bottom, a green stripe,

Janusz Rudnicki

  HANS, THAT HANS   He has to get off at Fredericksburg Hill, right before the city of Copenhagen, a so-called freeloader on the postal

Gift and Gear: The Work of Thomas McGrath

I met Thomas McGrath in the summer of 1987.  I was writing a master’s thesis on him, and had traveled by train to Minneapolis with a six-pack of Buckhorn beer — godawful beer favored by McGrath — to meet him for an interview. 

In Memoriam: Philip Levine

  IT’S NOT A POEM   Phil Levine died on Saturday. While the newspaper obituaries discussed his position as a “poet of the common man,”

THE STORY: Natalia Fernandez on Roddy Doyle’s “Bullfighting.”

  _______________________________________________________________________ Read Roddy Doyle’s “Bullfighting” here. _______________________________________________________________________ I’d always disliked family life. Even as a kid, I felt that the most pleasant moments had

THE POEM: Jack Kerouac’s 11th Chorus of Desolation Blues

  ____________________________________________________________________   Read Jack Kerouac’s 11th Chorus of Desolation Blues.   ____________________________________________________________________     I first encountered Jack Kerouac’s 11th Chorus of Desolation Blues

Arthur Eloesser

  CITIES AND CITY PEOPLE   (an excerpt)     Cities and City People: Berlin, 1919 Essays by Arthur Eloesser Translated from the German by

Geoffrey Geoffrey

  FOUR DAYS IN ILLINOIS WITH MY OLD MAN   My dad got lost on the way to the airport the weekend we flew to

THE POEM: Robert Peake on Marvin Bell’s “Wednesday”

  ____________________________________________________________________   Read Marvin Bell’s Wednesday ____________________________________________________________________   Marvin Bell’s poem “Wednesday” is the anthem of every working poet. It first appeared in the

Frank O’Hara on Erje Ayden

  from A PREFACE TO SADNESS AT LEAVING   Erje Ayden is the traditional “foreigner,” perhaps no more foreign to our language and ways than

Jim Fletcher on Erje Ayden

the thing i love most is his strange relation to the reader. he speaks in a way no other narrator, or author’s voice, does, that

Iris Dorbian

LIKABLE? WHO CARES!   Two years ago, after suffering a string of losses, the most devastating of which was the death of my beloved father,