For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] I vividly remember a moment when someone in one of my writing workshops described my writing as “blue collar” because I was writing about my father’s work as a Chicago firefighter. Until then, I had always viewed my upbringing as comfortably middle class. My parents worked incredibly hard and sacrificed often in order to … Read more
[ad_1] Mary Jo Bang’s acclaimed translation of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno starts with this unforgettable verse: “Stopped mid-motion in the middle / Of what we call our life, I looked up and saw no sky—Only / a dense cage of leaf, tree, and twig. I was lost.” As I am “mid-motion in the middle” of my … Read more
[ad_1] Imagine putting your relationship under a microscope and then sharing what you’ve discovered with the world. That is exactly what Jennifer Lang has done in her memoir Places We Left Behind, and we are all the better for it. When American-born Lang, a secular tourist, falls in love with French-born Philippe, an observant immigrant, … Read more
[ad_1] On the cover of Ripe, glistening red seeds cling to thin lines of white flesh—pomegranate innards. It is the perfect image for this book: close-up, torn open, almost bloody, almost biblical, impossible to ignore. Inside this cover, a deadly pandemic is creeping across the globe, rents are rising to untenable levels, and men are … Read more
[ad_1] A book that will unquestionably stand among the more poignant investigations of Mozart and his genius, Mozart and Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces, by poet and former Harvard visiting fellow Patrick Mackie, is a serious study of the composer’s character and music as it fits within the context of European manners … Read more
[ad_1] Annelyse Gelman’s curiosity and passion for language, multi-disciplinary collaboration, and experimentation imbue all her projects. Two of them—her new full-length poem, Vexations, and website Midst—also prove her fascination with craft and process. In our free-ranging conversation—encompassing poems as objects, durational art, text scores, endless beginnings and endings, and generative collaborations—Gelman’s enthusiasms are front and … Read more
[ad_1] Anthologies are simultaneously one of the most important venues for literature and an almost impossible task to create. Readers expect to be enlightened on multiple levels, with each individual entry telling a cohesive story while also working collectively with the other entries to add up to a larger meaning. At the heart of every … Read more
[ad_1] A list of Patricia Smith’s achievements in poetry could take up much of this interview. A poet, playwright, essayist, educator and mentor, she’s deservedly won nearly every accolade and award, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement, and earlier this year she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. … Read more
[ad_1] Lisa Cupolo’s debut book, Have Mercy on Us, won the W.S. Porter Prize for short story collections. The ten stories are a rich exploration of people continually seeking, wrestling, and walking the line of great tension in their relation to others, and also within themselves. There is an abiding sense of hope and mystery as … Read more
[ad_1] A trained sociolinguist, and the author of two novels, a short story collection, and three collections of poetry, Dipika Mukherjee has been exploring languages, cultures, and places since she was a young girl, as the child of an Indian diplomat. In her most recent poetry collection, Dialect of Distant Harbors, Mukherjee paints scenic pictures … Read more