Story
Santa Fe Three-Way
Stuart Watson
Ben leaned in, urged the others to scoot closer. When they had shrunk their triangle, he reached into the bag at his feet and removed a wooden box.
“Ooh, the evidence would suggest that you have been shopp...
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Sensitive Skin Books
The Absence of Angels
Christian X. Hunter
Sensitive Skin Books is proud to present THE ABSENCE OF ANGELS, Christian X. Hunter's three-decade tramp through the evolution of ‘60s East Village counter culture in a kaleidoscope of freaks, to the '70s and playing with bar bands and living in Vermont communes, to the '80s with Warhol Superstars, with encounters all along the way with Times Square grifters, junkie poets, rock stars, revolutionaries, in the back rooms of the Fillmore East, Max's Kansas City and The Mudd Club.
THE ABSENCE OF ANGELS is a synesthetic expedition through late 20th Century Manhattan. It’s a love story between a city and its denizens. Every page is permeated with poetic frenzy, grace and verve. Hunter captures the magical decay of the 70s and 80s like few other writers have. I LOVE THIS BOOK!
—Gillian McCain, co-author of Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk
Christian X. Hunter lets us ride shotgun to his life in the turbulent 1...
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Story
I’m 74 Years Old and Will Never Own a Driver’s License
David Halliday
On our first date it was quite windy
She told me she sneezed
1. The car was packed. Egg salad sandwiches had been prepared for the journey. There were lots of pickle jars. It was an expedition like the search f...
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Story
BECKETT REINVENTED: THE AGE OF A.I.
Jerry Patrick
(News item: Several of the leading tech companies have announced breakthroughs in the development of Chatbots, which hold promise of eliminating the profession of creative writing. And of course they would also eliminate t...
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Story
The Shadow Lifts Off Before You
bart plantenga
We were speeding at a rate some might consider reckless. But I’m a cabbie, so I know what I’m doing. The man was late and it’s just common courtesy to get him to his destination on time.
To quote fellow cabbie Aust...
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Story
Dog Days
Emily McNally
Though we’ve been treating my daughter’s anxiety for a while, I get fresh worry when I see the violet smudges under her eyes. There’s a weariness in the slump of her shoulders and the way she’s ignoring the cat weavi...
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Story
Glowing
Jared Dillian
Logan smiled awkwardly.
There were only so many economics books she could read during her summer break. She went to the library a few times, but it was filled with mostly children’s books—the economics books were amon...
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Poem
Starless Sky
Judith Lee Herbert
We played on our block––I couldn’t cross the street when I was four––
yellow caterpillars raining from trees in front of our red brick
building. My father told me don’t tell them the names of ou...
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Review
Matthew Wong: Transmissions From a More Perfect Cosmos – Review
Greg Masters
Precision is no longer necessary – nor aspired to – in the works of Matthew Wong. In his first museum retrospective in the U.S., fabrications of a parallel universe mirror our reality but offer an alternative representat...
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Story
The Closet
Jim Krusoe
Somehow or another Vince has managed to drive his car, the Toyota, into a bedroom closet, and though it is a small car and a fairly large closet, it’s in a closet nonetheless, with dresses and skirts and shirts and pants a...
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Story
Pop-Tarts
Lee Varon
The bar is small with a low black ceiling and a cement floor lit by red lightbulbs. “I Fall to Pieces” plays as she walks in.
He wears a black T-shirt with a picture of a gold toad on it and the word “TOAD” in g...
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Poem
Sunflowers of Bucha
Valery Oisteanu
The Sun is bursting with gunfire across Ukraine Looking at Stash’s photos from the front line
Huge yellow flowers blossom on abandoned tanks
Growing over and under the rusting trucks
Graffiti painted by the weakened sur...
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Review
THE FORBIDDEN LUNCHBOX by Richard Modiano – REVIEW
Marc Olmsted
THE FORBIDDEN LUNCHBOX
By Richard Modiano
Punk Hostage Press
$20.00
(Available on Amazon)
How can I review a book that reviews itself so elegantly in Richard Modiano’s own preface and Pam Ward’s introduction? Then there are remarks by Viggo Mortenson and Ronne Blakely. The list goes on. THE FORBIDDEN LUNCHBOX is, unsurprisingly, a very good, even great book. It is also Richard’s first, at age 71. Not even a prior chapbook of his own, ladies and gentlemen.
What took him so long?
The answer may be found first in his recent 10 years as Executive Director of Beyond Baroque, the Venice Beach, California literary center equivalent of NYC’s Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery. Like any true Platonic philosopher-king, he did not ask for it, let alone want it. Like the Roman Empire’s Marcus Aurelius, he ran BB with wisdom, dignity and humbleness. Alec Guinness played Marcus Aurelius in Anthony Ma...
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Poem
Rubble
Gregory Kolm
You thought this would be ground zero,
the birthplace of the upcoming revolution,
but nobody read the emails you sent,
or the magazines you handed out, or
tried to understand the class warfare that
you spoke about so hu...
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Review
The Menace of the Minotaur – a review of David Harrison Horton’s MAZE POEMS
John Greiner
MAZE POEMS
David Harrison Horton
Arteidolia Press
Daedalus, with his genius, was barely able to escape from the labyrinth of his own creation which was built to contain the Minotaur. Theseus, with the aid of Ariadne and her ball of twine was able to defeat the Minotaur and free the Athenians from the Cretian sacrifice of their young men and women in the labyrinth. David Harrison Horton, in his most recent book MAZE POEMS, has made use of Daedalus’s labyrinth, Theseus’s cleverness and Ariadne's practical skill to take on the Minotaur of language.
Language has taken on monstrous proportions in our modern era being used to propagate misinformation in the political realm. In contemporary culture language has too often taken on the lumbering weight of a didacticism that longs for fulfillment in the advent of a social realist hierarchy in a Year Zero horror utopia. Mr. Horton in MAZE POEMS has achieved the admirable end ...
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