The Hoedads were real hippies. They weren’t television and movie hippies—all flowers and headbands and incense—but actual funky, fiercely independent and often downright ornery Freaks, who were also idealistic and compassionate almost to a fault.
But when I was growing up, when I was hearing them tested every Tuesday morning at 10:30, the sirens were still called what they were when they were first installed during WWII all across a frightened America – air raid sirens.
* SureMed Home will vigorously pursue civil and legal action against any party making accusations alleging resident neglect or abuse.
Ironically, these seemingly cynical poems invite us to dig under the rainbow and see the flesh, the teeth, the hard truth of death; and the result is a beautifully complex twister of problems I want to solve.
Compared to the first book, the poems have become increasingly creepy, and the “murderer” more vivid. The story inches closer to a horror film, that scene when protagonists find out unpleasant secrets, searching in the shade.
“What do I do, knowing that I need impulses to live?” seems to be the question the book poses through narrative play, a juxtaposition of the main persona’s perspective and murderer’s influence.
And there are some hard truths. Most Buffalo elders notch their winters with salt, Vicks, and canned trout. They grouse about snowbirds and higher taxes. You can get mugged with ease on Clinton and Sycamore Street. Some folks still wonder why there’s plenty of coloreds around.
The reason for this circumstance is not so mystifying once we are prepared to acknowledge that the apprehension of death, and the necessity to mitigate that apprehension, always has and always will prompt and shape virtually every human activity.
The news is presented grosso modo, but the pleasure and humor in the work is in the poetry more than the facts and in how Beau Blue’s specific word choices play on how one had perceived the events.
The author of these words is speaking about themselves, a biological female. There is no mention in Je Nathanaël of a strap-on or the like, and to my understanding none is implied. The author is referring to something that is real, but not, literally speaking, physical: something which we’ll call the psychospiritual cock.
The title is ironic, playing on infinity and the number 8: if cats had nine lives, then we’d have one less, 9-1. The foreverness of loss. Are we lucky or unlucky to fall in love? Passions and thrills, heartaches and grief, walk hand in hand.
The identity in of the author is quite certain and solid, grounded in local pleasures, tastes, weather and emotions. The questions that these poems ask are valuative, a weighing of what matters.
The Democratic Party in the United States is in chaos. The party has no leader, and the biggest names associated with the party could scarcely be more different from each other. Democratic socialists who excel in the social media demographic pull the conversation to the left...
The cacophonous sounds abound in keeping with the ambience of catacombs and wraiths: the shrieks of djinns, cries of gazelles, wraiths howling, hissing sands, djinns yelp, winds scream, minotaur’s roars echo, and prairie winds groan.
My intention is to be open, willing, and ready to any opportunity that might reveal itself as fruitful - to be in the right place at the right time, and, with the help of the universe, have all the pieces within my frame align with balance, order, and meaning.
The book is a psychological sci-fi filled with non-sensical gadgets, absurd dialogue, and all out madness, a batlle royale of good against evil, of womanhood against male perversion that follows William Burroughss Naked Lunch in reverse, if we consider the gender roles of the protagonists.
When his perceived enemies were the targets of mail bombs this fall, he never once reached out to the many high profile targets, but instead decided to whine about how the news coverage affected “republican momentum” before the midterms.
The poet here is playing with the impression of snow, bringing us back to our senses, the cold felt through an open palm. She creates a hot and cold sensation with the beautifully contrasting images of cold and tropical weather through the specifics of snow and a tropical tree shaped like a hand.
As poet and reader, I appreciate and applaud the well-executed craft of Caroline's unblinking recollections. As an old man, with both parents and in-laws in their Nineties and all of us inevitably declining at varying velocities, I find The Caregiver to be honest, both a painful and relieving read.
It is at its core, a criticism of the innate sexist culture of Sri Lanka and the poems vibrate with action, gesture, and compassion, describing horrible realities. However I have to note that, sadly, there are too many faults of language, concision and sentimentality.
As a general rule, our society is drifting back towards purity. Though this time it is not sexual or religious purity we seek, but ideological. Both socially and politically our culture hungers for a monolith of belief. A Liberal is One Thing, a Conservative is another.
Roberta Feins commands these sensual lines with grace, simplicity and feminine caress. She makes the sensual spiritual, through food and cloth, a commanded indulgence that suggest that all feeling starts with skin and tongue, and withers with time.
We tend to expect a lot of pretense from poetry: fancy language that makes for unreadable lines. Pieces of writing so pseudo-intellectual or obtuse that they can only be qualified as Machiavellian ploys to satisfy the author’s ego.
The world is shrinking every day. Information travels at the speed of thought, we can share ideas, funny pictures, recipes or new music easier than ever and the walls between cultures that were once impenetrable have now become translucent. We are supposed to be closer to one another than at any other time in human history.
I feel as if I am a passenger in a speeding car and the driver is some other version of myself, one who does not care or who is oblivious of consequence while the passenger is wondering where the car is going in hidden emotion.
No Ledge Left To Love confronts the problems of actuality, sex and meaning. The poems in the book value sex as the necessary destructive means to liberation from anxiety, and more specifically, to modern anxiety, sex having become the true playground for self-creation. The book is an embracing of self-conscious identity in the face of causality.
Don’t just donate your money, but your time and your talent as well. Get in the area and engage in politics until you recognize yourself in your leadership. Be good to people and fight for the people who can’t fight for themselves.
Unlikely Stories turned 20 years old on July 1, 2018. The 20th Anniversary Issue was released on July 4, 2018 and included more than a hundred authors and artists.
To set the process in motion I decide, arbitrarily, to use the three lines on page 62 as a post-snippet. Then, I begin at the bottom of page 61 and, working my way up to the title, arrive at the following poem:
a limited domain is inscribed with or without fuzzy boundaries. domains may be limited in sememe, space, and/or time. example: everglades bounded by hydrology, ecosystem. for example (below): everglades younger than writing, than human inscription.
We can’t give in to the sheer volume of problems. The people who want to stifle our voices want us to be overwhelmed and checked out so that we don’t engage in our communities and vote in these crucial elections.
It was recently discovered that 22% of Millennials in the US either haven’t heard of, or aren’t sure if they’ve heard of the Holocaust... That same study found that 11% of ALL US ADULTS fell into these categories.
A big reason there are fewer bigots in the military than in the civilian world is that prejudice does not stand well under contact. It’s hard to hate or stereotype a people if you are constantly confronted with their reality. When you eat together, laugh together, work together, and yes, sometimes suffer together, it becomes near impossible to create a false or hateful image of them.
The current warming of Earth manifest in the Arctic Sea, the melting of polar ice sheets, penetration of snow storms into mid-latitudes, permafrost thaw, hurricanes and wildfires and the rise in extreme weather events, manifesting a shift in state of the atmosphere-ocean system, constitutes an existential threat to humanity and much of nature.
We have to work together, side by side in pursuit of a common goal. That doesn’t mean we never have to disagree. It doesn’t mean we don’t have our issues or qualms: This isn’t kumbaya, this is survival.
While the territory this book takes us through is dark, a lot can be learned, including about contemporary groups like the KKK and the NRA, as well as the militarization of the culture (from pioneers to commandos) and the repression of people of color and the poor. Dunbar-Ortiz gives this difficult, at times abhorrent history a crisp and light touch, including personal anecdotes and well-chosen cultural references.
Many people in this country have been conditioned to believe that racism is an American-made product and that something can only be racist if it's filled with or inspired by hatred. That's not the case. Subconscious bias is a massive part of racism.
my side of the paradigm is built for comfort not for speed. willie dixon & werner heisenberg put me wise to this ride. an observation deck where i can kick or scrutinize questions that are supposed to be asked but aren't necessary, no matter how you spill the ink or beans.
Now cannot be the time for passivity; love is kind, but it is also fierce. As we go forward we can’t get lost in the weeds arguing with people about the very basics of human decency. People know right from wrong, and if they want so badly to hurt other people we know exactly where they stand.
Pages
