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“When the phone rings,
even in the middle of
a sandwich, I feel obliged
to answer. I see
a single vestigial board
of what was
a treehouse.”— From “Real Work,” a poem in X by Dan Chelotti, reviewed at The Rumpus by Kent Shaw. -
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“When Selasi coined “Afropolitan,” she understood that “the media’s portrayals won’t do. Neither will the New World trope of bumbling blue-black doctor.” Though there are two doctors in this story, she situates the characters within the context of the American privilege of movement, up and down through class boundaries, across oceans, by Amtrak trains and tro-tro. The Afropolitans of Ghana Must Go have a sense of individuality and humanity shaped not by what they do for a living or their material success, but by their desire and capacity for love.” -
“Speedboat somehow does without plot all the stuff that is usually plot’s responsibility… Literature, to get cute about it, isn’t about the story; it’s about the telling – the whole point of the fictive exercise is to impart feeling, not knowledge, or, because that really is too cute a sum-up, to effect some sort of emotional/spiritual response in the reader. It’s true that we’re hardwired in some infinitely mysterious way to tell, listen, and relate to stories, but at their core, stories are vehicles to smuggle the more real but less tangible stuff in – suspense, heartbreak, triumph, sympathy, beauty, sublimity, defeat, ennui, whatever it is that gets you off… All I’m saying is that literature isn’t as much about the story as it is about creating the space where the story happens. And Speedboat has, in the fullest, most praiseworthy sense, created a space, one dictated and propelled by an emotional, not a narrative, engine.” -
“The kiss wasn’t heavy or too high-stakes. It had come, I’d have said, in a natural way, just part of the conversation: a kiss that was really a thought of itself, if thought was a factor at all.” — In “Kiss of the Underachiever,” Scott Garson “turns the familiar ‘desire in a bar’ story into something uniquely propelled by the sound of the words.” Greg Gerke reviews Is That You, John Wayne. -
“The difference between the show and the truth is like the difference between the map and the terrain,” Borich writes, ostensibly about maps and mapping but inferring also, as a veteran teacher of writing, the dilemmas of crafting nonfiction. As with the writing down of lives, “Maps say more about where we think we’ve been than where we actually reside.” Maps are no more like the landscape they represent than text on a page can reconstruct the body or the life it has lived; they are not renderings of self so much as propositions.” -
“The zombies in this text, unlike most of the undead I’ve encountered in popular culture, don’t just run around searching out brains to slurp up, they are in fact quite sentimental. They “wander to nostalgically charged sites from their former lives,” due to some instinct that is activated within them, an instinct akin to that of the homing pigeons who are “famous and fascinating for the particles of magnetite in their skulls: bits of mineral sensitive to the electromagnetic pulls and capable of directing [them], like the needle of a compass, homeward over vast and alien distances.” — Mesha Maren reviews A Questionable Shape by Bennett Sims. -
If I lived here
before long
I would go crazy
for the ocean.
A lake just isn’t enough
for me.
As beautiful as this gem
reflects earth’s diamond grave
I could die here for love’s sake
while I’m still strong.
Before long
(why take it seriously)
the sun’s gone down
as I was drowning in you
sorrows and all.How deep does it have to go?
A lake just isn’t enoughin this rough deep
cold.“Inland,” from Joseph Ceravolo’s Collected Poems, reviewed at The Rumpus by Barbara Berman.
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“I like Patricia Vigderman because she likes jickjacking. She describes in “A Writer’s Harvest”, an earlier piece in Possibility: Essays Against Despair, how the sight of that slangy word, in two distinct (but linked) stories—one by Mary Karr, the other by David Foster Wallace—motivate her toward personal tangents and pleasures. “For I am one,” she explains, “whose jickjacking heart does beat for language, and if you tell me a word in the morning, I will try to use it by lunchtime.” — Matthew Pitt reviews Possibility: Essays Against Despair by Patricia Vigderman over at The Rumpus.
