Just returned home (Portland? Still weird) from a week in Maine blissfully absent of most human contact. I feel better about everything, or, at the very least, like I have a better perspective on what I need to be doing with myself from here on out. I think staying in one place for an extended [...]
Archive for the ‘book reviews’ Category
The pipes in the downstairs bathroom make really scary noises when the washer guts itself
Posted in book reviews, tagged e.b. white, john steinbeck, maine, musty book smell on July 30, 2009 | 1 Comment »
What i learned this weekend
Posted in book reviews, tagged arbitrary, books, camus, fiction sux, paul celan, poetry, wut on April 25, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
New Jersey makes poems.
I read The Sunlight Dialogues and swore off lengthy realistic fiction forever.
Read The Fall in a daze & rekindled a cautious love for Camus.
Got halfway through The Prince and realized there’s a reason they just tell you about it in history class instead of making you read it.
The best adjective for Paul [...]
“Art is not sense broken up into line.” – Dorothea Lasky
Posted in book reviews on February 9, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
When someone says the poetry scene today consists of \”a lot of brilliant people with serious boundary issues\”(taken wildly out of context here) the first poet I think of is Dorothea Lasky. The images in her poems melt into one another and re-form, filling the reader with a sense of transformation innate to her writing. [...]
“Art redeems us from time.” – Joan Acocella
Posted in book reviews, tagged books, chapbooks, existentialist feminism, john ashbery, simone de beauvoir, the ethics of ambiguity on December 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Just finished reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity – my interest in the author having been sparked last year after reading parts of The Second Sex and my (very) limited understanding of existentialist philosophy. Although she referred to Ethics as “a little essay about ethics: how can morals and politics be adjusted to [...]
Posted in book reviews, tagged hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world, haruki murakami on November 8, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Haruki Murakami is trying to get into your head.
In a story that muddles over the temporal nature of the mind, the nature of the subconscious and the (im)morality of science, Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is a lot of moderately entertaining filler interspersed with meditations on the philosophical. One catches whiffs [...]
Poetry Round-Up!
Posted in book reviews, tagged anne carson, china the vagina, dan beachy-quick, dirty old man, frederick seidel, hagiography, jen currin, karen volkman, ooga-booga, poetry, spar, spell, the autobiography of red on October 6, 2008 | 2 Comments »
I meant to review a lot of the books I read this summer that I never really got around to. For whatever reason this is weighing heavily on my conscience. In order to move on with my life and purge these books from me, here’s a little ole poetry round-up (i.e. shorter, half-assed reviews) to [...]
