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Category Archives: Reviews
Review: How To Live On Bread and Music by Jennifer K Sweeney
As recipient of the 2009 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, the only major American award for a second book of poetry, it would be easy to passively dismiss Jennifer K. Sweeney’s How to Live on Bread and Music as another collection in the long line of contest winners that swell our local bookstores’ shelves… Continue reading
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Tagged Adam Tavel, How To Live on Bread and Music, Jennifer K. Sweeney, Perugia Press
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Review: The Taqwacores
Michael Muhammad Knight may be the dark horse candidate for Literary Success Story of the Year. In 2009, Soft Skull Press published five of his books; I’ll review each of these in the coming weeks. Soft Skull began this project with a rerelease of 2004’s The Taqwacores, a novel that has become the foundational text for a Muslim punk movement of the same name. EyeSteelFilm has just released a documentary about this movement, in which Knight is featured prominently… Continue reading
Review: Further Adventures in The Restless Universe by Dawn Raffel
Yesterday, I received in my campus mailbox a desk copy of The Norton Introduction to Literature: Portable Edition (2006). It is standard anthology fare, including “Helpful and unobtrusive editorial matter” (this from a list of features that is included in the Preface for Instructors). Some of that editorial matter includes the following, taken from the “Understanding the text” section of the poetry unit, under the heading “Language”:
The System of Vienna: From Heaven Street to Earth Mound Square by Gert Jonke
The System of Vienna is slim (as are the other two from Dalkey; none of them breaks the 150-page mark) and it is “playful” – a word used frequently in reviews of and commentary on Jonke’s work, perhaps only slightly less so than “experimental.” I’d argue that what makes Vienna the former is the same thing that makes it the latter… Continue reading
