Writing Archives - Page 3 of 49 - Sensitive Skin Magazine

The Brothers Silver: A Poet’s Novel – Review

Sparrow

The Brothers Silver: A Poet’s Novel by Marc Jampole Poets write novels invertedly; the language comes first, then the plot ‒ if there even is a plot. In his Acknowledgments, Marc Jampole mentions a number of poems that have been transformed into prose in The Brothers Silver. My favorite poet-novels are by Beat luminary-turned-Zen Buddhist monk Philip Whalen: Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head and You Didn’t Even Try. Both are gentle, sad, inconclusive portraits of San Francisco in the mid-1960s. The writing is deceptively simple, but there is a poet’s languor; a sense of the narrator watching patiently, from a great distance. Jampole writes tempestuously, with rising and flipping wordplay: Desire to play Oberon in the school play claws at me. This hunger doesn’t rest, to say out loud in front of everyone, “At a fair vestal thronèd by the west….” To a mirror twin, I exclaim my lines for hours. Audition day I ...

Two Poems by Andrey Filimonov, translated by Anton Yakovlev

Andrey Filimonov

These poems were written in the mid-2010s in Siberia, in the ancient city of Tomsk, where it's not such an easy task to fix a Mac. In fact, repairs of any kind tend to be a problem. Nineteenth-century houses tilt to the side...

Building Muscle

Kelly Cowan

playing Visit California CD 8 songs - “get into that unique California state of mind” on exercise bike building muscle after surgery Mamas and Papas - in rhythm Kool & the Gang - now I’m moving w/ cooke...

Cultivating Pippi Longstocking

Neil Martinson

One warm spring afternoon in 1990 I was walking across the Williamsburg Bridge on my way to Manhattan, as I’d done countless times during my years in Brooklyn. A recent, tumultuous breakup was still fresh in my mind, but I was beginning to feel somewhat liberated, enjoying the freedom of finally living alone, and learning to have fun again. The bridge scene from Pippi On The Run flashed into my mind, and in a split second I knew what I had to do. In this movie, the heroine Pippi Longstocking’s indomitable approach to life achieves its peak expression, centering around her ability to achieve anything she wants, often by refusing to accept the impossible. The scene in my mind has Pippi and her two friends Tommy and Annika looking down from a bridge at a steam-engine train chugging along the tracks below. Pippi suggests all three of them jump off the bridge onto the roof of the moving train. Uptight Annika begs her not to do it, bu...

The Prisoner

James Reich

I remember his gallows thighs. His cock swung like a rope. The camp was weighted with snow and silence, settled with barbed wire, starvation in its planks and silted soup. Among the black beds, in cover of crowding, we fucke...

(a strange awakening of light that takes the place of dawn) – Poems by Jim Feast — REVIEW

Thaddeus Rutkowski

(a strange awakening of light that takes the place of dawn) poems by Jim Feast Autonomedia $16.29 The subtitle for Jim Feast’s latest poetry collection, “Poems for Lady Bunny: Chicago, 1972–1975,” clues us in to the time and place for these basically metrical, mostly long poems. As Feast explains in his introduction, Lady Bunny was a painter who served as his “muse, mentor and she-devil’s advocate.” This book, then, works as a tribute to and elegy for this artist, who died in 1977. Many of the poems are dated in the early to mid-1970s, when Feast was a young man. The book has an attractive cover painting by R. Brown Lethem. In the book’s first poem, “For the Painter, Lady Bunny,” Feast describes one of Bunny’s “compositions” and by doing so sets out his aesthetic purpose: The room draws near to the red beads of rain on the window. The sun settles like a rose covered over in snow. Now ...

A poem by Boris Khersonsky, translated from Russian by Nina Kossman

Boris Khersonsky

A poem by Boris Khersonsky Translated from Russian by Nina Kossman *** three kings gathered in one golden sarcophagus in the Cologne cathedral that survived the bombing king on king prophet on prophet and magic...

Edward D. Wood, Jr., Selected Poems – Review

John Pietaro

Edward D. Wood, Jr., Selected Poems, Unexpurgated Edition Black Scat Books, 2020 Yes, it really is that Ed Wood. Recalled in cult movie circles as the bizarro planet’s Orson Welles, Wood was writer-director-producer ...

In The Shark World

Francine Witte

In the shark world, even, there are rules, laws about sleepswimming and razor teeth and what the sharkbelly wants. Like my father and his own rules, laws for his kingdom, our tiny apartment with the neighbors’ fo...

The Cowboy

James Reich

Here came a cowboy with sun-saddled skin. He had killed but once, but had killed simply, in Santa Fe where the turquoise tells. The cowboy was young with a jackrabbit’s poise, a buck-toothed boy, spring-heeled and dun. It ...

Everything Is Radiant Between the Hates – Poems by Rich Ferguson – Review

Kathleen Reichelt

Everything Is Radiant Between the Hates Poems by Rich Ferguson Moon Tide Press In his newest book of poetry Rich Ferguson promises a puzzle. Or according to the poet, collaborations “with clouds creating poems continuously changing shape & meaning, depending how you look at them”. Rich doesn’t disappoint. Everything Is Radiant Between the Hates, published by Moon Tide Press and released in January 2021, delivers this and more. Everything Is Radiant Between the Hates, poems by Rich Ferguson In the eight section book, Rich Ferguson begins his lunar journey with relationships that end. When Rich addresses the tear from his mother who handed me over to the brass-knuckled moon in “A Worry Bead, a Blessing” and the amnesiac moon, a lunatic laundromat robbing me of my quarters in “When Her Blood-Red Kiss Stains My Breath”, he isn’t mixing his metaphors. The theme of moon repeats throughout this book, carefully...

Painted Silence: Visual Metaphysics

Yuko Otomo

dedicated to Franck André Jamme (21 nov 1947 – 1 oct 2020) 16. Marvelously anonymous. Like an antidote. Or a balm. 26. … The lighter, the purer… 37. Abstraction. To abbreviate. To see it all, finally ...

IN THE REBEL CAFE: Interviews with Ed Sanders – Review

Marc Olmsted

IN THE REBEL CAFE Interviews with Ed Sanders edited by Jennie Skerl Clemson University Press $120.00 Jennie Skerl has put together a magnificent intro/crash course to Ed Sanders, "second generation" Beat. Sanders, to many of us, needs no introduction, but he is not the household name that many of the "first generation" are. Further complexity involving appreciation of Sanders is how many angles one can know him from. Many are more aware of his band The Fugs. Perhaps one read The Family in one of its revisions, Sanders' journalistic exploration of Charles Manson, (and among the absolute best of the true crime genre). Finally, one may know him poetically, and in particular, through his "investigative poetics" - journalistic, historical, data-collecting poetics, a refinement and extension of the political "list" poetry of Allen Ginsberg such as "CIA Dope Calypso," which arguably has its own musical influence from Th...

Blackouts Are Beautiful

Charles March III

These addiction/mental health medical note erasures are a cathartic attempt to creatively find the joy and humor in the absurdity of all of life’s ridiculousness. On the Cover of Seventeen Puff, Puff, Pass ...

Mermaids Are People Too

bart plantenga

“That happens to be nothing less than a mermaid. An authentic, flesh & blood mermaid.” —William Powell, Mr. Peabody & the Mermaid Bikini Girl requested – demanded! – that I show up at the Monkey Bar in a...