This Month's Articles

REVIEWING

Skin, Inc. Identity Repair Poems

by Thomas Sayers Ellis

OUTSIDE THE BOX

Reviewed by James Petcoff

It has taken me several weeks reading and rereading the poems of Thomas Sayer Ellis and I am now beginning to see the light.  Poetry, like music, must be heard to have its fullest impact. Words on a piece of paper, just like musical notation, are nothing without a delivery system.  It is the immediate connection between the poet reading aloud to an audience that gives poetry life, and it is in the response of the audience from the delivery system that creates the poetic experience.

One

The old style of representing “likeness” is over
and perform-a-formers, though appreciative of
metaphor and simile, no longer need either to
express nuance in poetry. The matrimony of page
and stage insists on eliminating the false functions
between the line and the limb. All rhyme schemes
.....Read More

MEMOIR

What is it and why bother?

by Jill Noel Shreve

I have a photograph.

Chocolate-brown paneled walls fill the background of the photograph. In the foreground sits a woman. She’s the purpose of the photo. The photo stops at her chest, only giving the woman’s face and neck and shoulders. Her maple-sugar colored hair coils in tight, short curls on the top of her head. Her cream-colored forehead stretches high and wide. Gold-rimmed glasses perch on her nose. Her faint eyebrows rest over her hydrangea-colored eyes. Cloud-colored shadow highlights her lids. Gold shrimp hoops hang from her earlobes, one looks to dangle lower than the other. Layers of cabernet-colored gloss cover her lips and pink petal powder rests high on her cheek-bones. Her jaw slopes down toward a chin that curves rather than angles. Her neck quickly vanishes under a round-collared, nearly black blouse. I can make out the faint outline of deep violet roses within the folds of the blouse. A large, wilted satin bow—a bow the color of ripe dewberries—droops just under the blouse’s collar. The woman sits with impeccable posture on a high-backed wooden chair that almost fades into the chocolate-brown panelling.....Read More

REVIEWING

One Page at a Time: On a Writing Life

by Pat Carr

Reviewed by Sarah Vogelsong

Pat Carr’s One Page at a Time: On a Writing Life is an odd book. Framed as a memoir of a woman writer, I wanted to like it—even today, there is a dearth of major women writers in American letters, and so a book that promised to look thoughtfully at the development of one sparked both my interest and hope. The first page seemed to fulfill my expectations. Broaching the question of “why I became a writer,” Carr offers an intriguing explanation: “I may have come to stories simply through the lies the adults in my life told.”

Right away, I folded down the corner of the page to mark it as a potent idea deserving further attention, and then moved, with.....Read More

NOVEL

The African Gentleman

…and The Plot to Re-establish The New World Order

A Novel by Fred Beauford

Chapters 12-16

12

As I later pondered Gladys' story, and my reaction to it, I realized that I had acted in a manner I had promised her I wouldn't. My hopes of being a leading man in her next novel had been severely diminished. When I visit Assai later this week at the detention center where he was being held, I will add this to the many questions I have for him.

13

My brief talk with Assai was barely worth the trip. He was still being held on what I now know are conspiracy charges but I remain in the dark as to what he was conspiring to do. I do know that our company was not implicated, and thank the Lord, or whoever else, we are carrying on the.....Read More

A WRITER'S WORLD

"Being Flamed"

by Molly Moynahan

Getting reviewed is the result, good or bad, of being published. Back in the day, reviews came after your publishing date. Depending on the marketing efforts of your publisher, you might have multiple reviews or just a few. Newspapers contained the majority of reviews followed by magazines and then radio. Reviews were sometimes nasty but at least they were limited in their scope.

“Like being locked in the closet with a hysterical adolescent.” That was.....Read More

REVIEWING

Endgame

by Frank Brady

Reviewed by Michael Carey

“What do you know about Bobby Fischer?” I was asked before starting Frank Brady’s Fischer biography, Endgame. I knew he played chess and was a young prodigy.  Moreover, I thought that he was “gone,” something I learned from a SNL skit from the mid-90s that involved the Spartan cheerleaders at a chess match chanting, “Bobby Fischer, where is he?  I don’t know!  I don’t know!  He’s gone!” 

Brady’s Endgame informed me that although the chess great was a fugitive from.....Read More

PORTFOLIO

Portfolio

by Kara Fox

It comes as no surprise that Michael Freund presents to the world great creative expression. Born in Vienna, the son of a member of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Michael grew up surrounded by classical music. He claims it flows in his blood. At the early age of 15, he left high school to begin studying the harp. Michael was the youngest officially enrolled student at Vienna's 'Hochschule Fuer Musik Und Darstellende Kunst,' the famed conservatory. At 21, drawn into modeling and other distractions, he moved to New York City. Now, almost 22 years later.....Read More

REVIEWING

Padre Pio—Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age

by Sergio Luzzatto

Translated by Fredrika Randall
Metropolitan Books

Reviewed by Jane M McCabe

“For a Capuchin friar hidden away in the half-empty San Giovanni Rotondo monastery on the remote Gargano Peninsula in southern Italy, September 20, 1918, was fateful day. Around nine that morning, while Padre Pio of Pietrelcina was praying before a crucifix in the monastery chapel ‘a mysterious personage’ materialized before him, a figure bleeding from his hands, feet and his side. Alarmed, the thirty-one-year-old priest begged for God’s assistance. The figure disappeared immediately, but Padre Pio’s alarm only grew when he saw that Jesus’ stigmata were now visible on his own body. ‘I look at my hands, feet and side and see they are wounded and blood is pouring out,’ he wrote to his spiritual adviser. ‘All my innards are bloody and my eye must resign itself to watch.....Read More

ART BEAT

Art Beat- March 2011

by Lindsey Peckham

Andrew Jones

Known mostly for his beautiful “stoopscapes” that detail the ornate facades of West Village brownstones bathed in sunlight, Andrew Jones has recently branched out and begun painting breathtaking landscapes, recently on display at the Salmagundi Gallery. Drawing inspiration from the beauty of nearby Weir Farm in Connecticut (full disclosure: I have an admitted soft spot for Weir Farm as I grew up five minutes from this gorgeous haven for local artists), his renderings of the sun-dappled trees have a dreamy, maze-like quality to them. These new works retain the abstracted realism that defines his stoop-works, while taking it to a different level. Andrew Jones, city mouse, meet Andrew Jones, country.....Read More

REVIEWING

The Other Life

by Ellen Meister

Reviewed by Janet Garber

Port Me No Portals

Life may be going on right this instant in another dimension, mirroring our own, while diverging in some unsuspected particulars.  Of course there are the scientific speculations (Many-Worlds theory), religious interpretations (Hinduism and Islam) and legions of sci-fi renditions.

In the 90’s TV show, Sliders, teenager Quinn Mallory (Jerry O’Connell) and his buddies went “sliding” into a different alternate universe every week.  Sometimes the new world looked like a perfect replica until they found that penicillin had never been discovered, or dinosaurs still strutted their stuff, or red-lipped vampires were fronting rock bands.  Always the crew decided to try to get home one more time, nothing being quite as alluring to them as the life they left in “Kansas.”

Ellen Meister puts this time-honored device in the service of one young mother, Quinn Braverman, who, from a young age, senses that she has the ability to move into another world via portals which appear as fissures.....Read More

REVIEWING

Shadow Tag

by Louise Erdrich

Reviewed by Sally Cobau

In Louise Erdrich’s newest book, Shadow Tag, the reader is privy to a fictional diary (actually two fictional diaries, but I’ll get to that in a moment); what we are not privy to in real life are court documents relating to the accusations that Michael Dorris, Erdrich’s estranged husband at the time, sexually abused one of their children.

This book is primarily about two things—escape and possession.  It circles.....Read More