November 30, 2018
Three-Minute Book Review: Lauren Moseley on Emily Jungmin Yoon's Ordinary Misfortunes (Tupelo Press, 2017)
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1) If you planted this book in the ground, what would grow?
A pear tree, a train, a monument to the wianbu—Korean women and girls who were kept and repeatedly raped by Japanese soldiers during World War II.
Most of the poems in this powerful chapbook refer to these “comfort women.” As the author notes ...
November 20, 2018
I have been thinking for a while about how our attempts to define craft terms influence our students’ (and our own) aesthetics, and I have wanted to try other definitions. The first post is here.
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Plot:
acceptance or rejection of consequences
The way we typically teach plot—as a string of causally linked events rising out of character—is useful. It’s engaging to read. It’s suspenseful to think that ...
November 15, 2018
Three-Minute Book Review: Katharine Coldiron on Maya Sonenberg’s After the Death of Shostakovich Père(PANK Books, 2018)
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1) What is this book’s theme song?
Despite the name, it is not something by Shostakovich. It’s the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the one that haunts and marches and waltzes all at once. The one that’ll make you weep and then not remember why you wept. ...
November 01, 2018
Three-Minute Review: Amy Beeder on Lauren Camp's One Hundred Hungers (Tupelo Press, 2016)
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What should you eat while reading this?
Dates, candied apricots, olives…but I’m cheating, because this book is full of food: brown boiled eggs, m’hasha, lamb, liver, “banquets of meatballs, platters of rice…tables stacked with a surfeit of buttery hope.” For the family at the heart of this book, food and ...
