AltWeeklies Wire
'Degrees of Latitude' Breaks Laurel Blossom's Pain into Piecesnew
Laurel Blossom's collection transcends self-pity by shattering the image of the author's bad childhood and even worse adulthood. Blossom mixes shards of memory with other shards: overheard conversation, punchlines, newspaper headlines, family expressions, and music.
Charleston City Paper |
John Stoehr |
11-12-2008 |
Poetry
'Scratch Beginnings' is Kind, Compassionate, and Naivenew
Instead of challenging his beliefs, Shepard's descent into poverty only adds to the already vexing verisimilitudes of poverty. Instead of offering insight into what he experienced and what that means to others like him, Shepard offers a book dazed by reality and confused by how to respond to it.
Charleston City Paper |
John Stoehr |
11-05-2008 |
Nonfiction
Poet Elizabeth Spires Answers Big Questions with Small Answersnew
When I found out my 401(k) lost more than a quarter of its value -- about four month's worth of salary dissipating into the ether -- I wasn't in the mood to review Elizabeth Spires' new book of poems, The Wave-Maker.
Charleston City Paper |
John Stoehr |
09-24-2008 |
Poetry
Hard Contraries Meet in 'God Particles'new
Thomas Lux's God Particles is replete with iron words -- language hardened by hammer and tong, images smoldering with bitterness and irony, a worldview grown misanthropic by the disappointments of human folly.
Charleston City Paper |
John Stoehr |
09-17-2008 |
Poetry
A New Quarterly Helps Us Understand Who We Think We Arenew
A new quarterly hopes to provide more background about the world and less foreground. It's called Dispatches and this inaugural issue focuses on American culture, looking at it from "the inside out, the outside in," write the editors.
Charleston City Paper |
John Stoehr |
08-20-2008 |
Books
'Stop Me If You've Heard This' Is as Valuable as You'd Thinknew
I once took a class in which the professor believed the point in studying Shakespeare's comedies was not amusement so much as profitable scholarship. The Bard's comedies, in his view, were his most serious work. To see this, though, students had to assume that funny and serious weren't at odds.
I hoped similar reasoning informed Jim Holt’s new book, Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes.
I was wrong.
Charleston City Paper |
John Stoehr |
08-13-2008 |
Nonfiction
Frank Bidart's New Poems Sing Hymns to a Meaningless Universenew
His excellent new book, Watching the Spring Festival, reflects a man feeling his age, the slip of time, and the tug of oblivion. It attempts to confront the paradox of being while trying to inscribe something lasting, and also expressing unblinkingly man's cosmic dilemma -- that maybe, just maybe, there is no exit.
Charleston City Paper |
John Stoehr |
08-06-2008 |
Poetry
Stories about Stories: Kevin Brockmeier’s new story collection retells (relatively) new talesnew
Each of the 13 stories in The View from the Seventh Layer is some ingenius variation of narrative genre — there are four fables, a ghost story, an alien abduction story, a fantasy, a science-fiction romance, a situation comedy of sorts, and even a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story.
Only a few of these breezy and sometimes elegant stories subscribe to that 20th-century dogma of short-story writing that Michael Chabon has called — in the tongue-and-cheek introduction to McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales — the “contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story.”
Charleston City Paper |
John Stoehr |
07-23-2008 |
Fiction
Making Noise: The Composer's Cultural Predicament in the 20th Centurynew
New Yorker critic Alex Ross' book is a corrective for classical music history.
Charleston City Paper |
John Stoehr |
01-02-2008 |
Nonfiction
