Clik here to view.
Town of Shadows
Town of Shadows Lindsay Stern Scrambler Books, 2012 96 pages $12 What: a debut prose-poem novella Who: the eponymous town of shadows And: its cast of shadowy characters, including a rug doctor, a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
“He Had Crossed to Arrive There”: A Playlist for Italo Calvino’s Invisible...
Every time I read Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities I get something different from it. Like NPR’s Eric Weiner writes, “I leave it, again and again, and yet never discover it—never really know it.”...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Color Master: An Interview with Aimee Bender
Certain stories never leave you. When I was six years old, I read such a story in Alvin Schwartz’s In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories: “The Green Ribbon.” In it, a young girl named Jenny...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Magic of Objects
Simon Renard de Saint-André, via Wikimedia Commons “I would say that the moment an object appears in a narrative,” Italo Calvino writes, in Six Memos for the New Millennium, “it is charged with a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Formal Imagination of Oulipo
Founded in 1960 by a collective of French mathematicians and writers, Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature), or Oulipo, was established to identify new forms of writing...
View ArticleClik here to view.
L’Appel du Vide: On Visual Caesuras and Erasure
I take the five students of my poetry micro-workshop outside to discuss Claudia Emerson’s latest collection Impossible Bottle. As we sit in the sun, bending over the brilliant bright book pages, a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Space Fiction vs. Space Discovery
Co-authored by Charles Wohlforth and Amanda R. Hendrix, Beyond Earth gives many readers more questions than answers. Beyond supplying the non-scientist with foundational information on what we...
View ArticleClik here to view.
“Adventure of a Skier” and Calvino’s Theory of Lightness
Last week, the New Yorker released the first English translation of Italo Calvino’s “The Adventure of a Skier,” which first appeared in the 1970 short story collection Difficult Loves. But how does...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Nearness of the Moon
It can sometimes feel like a poetic cliché to even look at the Moon. It seems almost too easy a way to summon cyclicality, illumination, mystery, and even romanticism. The Moon is always shifting...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Italo Calvino and the Form of Outer Space
Literary texts and other categories of art often give rise to questions about the relationship between form and content. These questions can be deceptively simple: Why is this poem suited to be a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Italo Calvino and the New Gods of Boston
In 1972, Italo Calvino wrote that “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears.” Nearly five decades later fear seems to have the upper hand. This year, my understanding of Boston, where I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Knowing and Not Knowing in Italo Calvino’s The Written World and the...
The Written World and the Unwritten World Italo Calvino (translated by Ann Goldstein) Mariner Books Classics | January 17, 2023 The release of The Written World and the Unwritten World, a collection...
View Article
