Blog
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My Top Reading Experiences of 2018
2018 was the year I dug deep into work of Susan Howe, spurred by this great piece by Emily LaBarge in BookForum. I’m now using a line by Howe as an Epigraph for my new manuscript, Which Direction Home. That line is: “I am an American poet writing in the English language. I have loved watching…
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Jason Molina’s Love and Work
We moved to Bloomington, Indiana two years ago and one of the things I’ve done living here is research Jason Molina, whose label, Secretly Canadian, is four blocks from our house on the west side of downtown. Some results of my research so far were published last week in two forms – first, a commissioned…
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Jesse Helms and Jane’s Addiction
One reason why I’m currently researching Jane’s Addiction is because their show I attended on November 13, 1990 in Chapel Hill, N.C. was a week after the first Senate race of Jesse Helms v. Harvey Gantt, who was an African-American architect that led the race the whole time before barely losing at the end, after…
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“This is Why” by Tracy K. Smith
Here’s the first paragraph of Tracy K. Smith‘s introduction to American Journal, an extraordinary new collection of 50 poems by 50 living poets selected by her. I think hers is the best explanation for this kind of work that I’ve ever read. And I believe it applies to all sorts of documentary poetry, not just writing.…
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Paperback of Gene Smith’s Sink with New (Original) Cover
The paperback edition of Gene Smith’s Sink came out last week. The cover, I just learned today when I opened a box of them, is the one we (me, my editor, the designer) strongly preferred for the hardback, with no images. It’s a literary book, we argued, not a photography book. But the higher-ups overrode…
