Recent Entries:

Sonja Livingston’s Ghostbread is a memoir about growing up poor, fatherless, white, Catholic, and one of seven children in the bleak neighborhoods of Buffalo and Rochester, the towns along Lake Ontario, and an Indian reservation during the 1970s.

“In a poem,” wrote Laurie Sheck, “it is not enough to tell the hidden story. The question is also how to look at the subterfuge, the cover, how power functions to block out what it can’t absorb, what would undermine it.” She maintains that language, usurped by insidious forces, must be interrogated, broken down, and re-educated before we can trust its allegiance to Us, not Them.

On its pensive surface, Peter Campion’s second collection of poems, The Lions, shuttles between irreconcilable poles: the tumult of human conflict and culture versus the “ancient and ahistorical” life of the animal. While the path between these two pounded stakes becomes rutted with repetition, the poems try to speak beyond their famous motif.

“The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities,” wrote Susan Sontag while thinking about E.M. Cioran. Thoroughly up to date -- meaning cut off from the future and removed from the past – a poet is stranded in the present, just like everybody else.

The late Dick Egan, my former boss and the founder of EMC Corporation, liked to tell Wall Street analysts that “data storage is like heroin. Once the customer bites, we’ve got him hooked. He’ll need more and more just to keep up.” Wall Street believed him and EMC became the top growth stock of the 1990s.

Michelle Huneven’s Blame, her third novel, has been discussed in The New York Times Book Review, on NPR, and in newspapers and book blogs around America. Its premise is out in the open.