New Paintings – Stephen Lack
Stephen Lack
Expressionist, impressionist, symbolist. Pop imbued with guilt, political outrage, occasional indignation, existential disconnection and an overriding sense of loss. These works celebrate where I have been with tenderness, s...
Vladislav Khodasevich: Midlife Meltdown in Paris
Jenny Wade
During the unusually hot Parisian summer of 1924, 38-year-old Vladislav Khodasevich—regarded by Nabokov as the finest Russian poet since Blok—was suffering from an identity crisis. One of 3 million exiled from Soviet Rus...
The Earring
Alan Kaufman
I first saw the gold crescent of renegade freedom dangling from the lobe of a nameless hairy hippy Goy, his scrawny, insolent neck bound by a red bandanna. He leaned with outthrust hip of impertinent American coolness agains...
Ballad of a Lousy Husband
Joshua Mohr
I should probably tell you more about the night Blue pushed me off the bar because that was really when our marriage ended. Sure, we stayed together another nine, twelve, maybe fifteen months more, but nothing was ever goo...
Found in Phoenix by Amy Ouzoonian – A Review by Jim Feast
Jim Feast
Found in Phoenix by Amy Ouzoonian (New York: Fly By Night Press, 2014)
It’s a good thing Amy Ouzoonian put her name on her new book of poems, short stories and plays, Found in Phoenix, because otherwise a reader would t...
The World of Wrestling
Roland Barthes
The grandiloquent truth of gestures
on life's great occasions.
--Baudelaire
The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient th...
Caravaggio, Baby
Deborah Pintonelli
I have a date with Henry Henderson. We worked together one long summer canvassing for Greenpeace. Yes, I was one of those annoying young people who stop you on the street when you are rushing to your next appointment. He was...
The 9 Lives of Ray the Cat Jones: A Novel by Stewart Home
Barbara Adair
The 9 Lives of Ray the Cat Jones: A Novel by Stewart Home (Test Centre, 2014)
In June 2013 Stewart Home, an (in) famous London author/writer/performer, receives a parcel. There is no return address on it; or a name to ind...
Silent Calls: Short Poems from Sparrow
Sparrow
Silent Calls
You know how sometimes the phone rings and when you answer it no one’s there? Many of those calls are made by cats.
Science Virgin
“I’m a science virgin,” said Adele. “I’ve n...
Double – Jim Bove and Matt Renzi
Jeff Spirer
What happens when two friends, Jim Bove and Matt Renzi, who have played together for years walk into the studio with no charts, no plans, no ideas? When “Just GO” is the inspiration?
Drummer Jim Bove and sax/oboe play...