Jan 02
review first published in misfitmagazine.net, Issue No. 37, Winter 2024 Reading Koweski’s latest collection is like a heavyweight fight with life, language, and poetry. In fact, one of my favorite poems in the collections evokes the image of “the lifeless eyes of sonny liston.” The former champion who lost his crown to then Cassius Clay, …
Jan 01
review first published in misfitmagazine.net, Issue No. 37, Winter 2024 William Taylor, A Room Above a Convenience Store, Roadside Press, available from www.magicaljeep.com 2023, 88 pages, $15 Taylor’s latest collection spans the pandemic years and a time of personal health crisis involving serious heart surgery. Perhaps, the most effective ones involve people he meets during …
Dec 31
review first published in misfitmagazine.net, Issue No. 37, Winter 2024 Westley Heine, Street Corner Spirits: poems and flash fiction, Roadside Press, available from www.magicaljeep.com or your favorite online retailer, 2023, 146 pages, $15 Street Corner Spirits is the second Roadside Press publication for Heine following his novel about trying to make his way as a …
Dec 31
Nathan Graziano, Born on Good Friday, Roadside Press, available at www.magicaljeep.com 2023, 80 pages, $15 I was reading the recent anthology from Nerve Cowboy: Selected Works 1996-2004 ( a best of the early years of long running print poetry zine) that featured four poems of Graziano’s from that era, reminding me how long I had …
Dec 20
Susan Ward Mickelberry’s poetry presents a “microcosm of body”—an intimacy of sensory experience found in whippoorwills and windows, fish bones and raspberries, mosquitos and moss, blood and thorns, a standard sink, a red tricycle. But this intimacy of detail, along with gentle rhythms of Mickelberry’s narrative voice, cannot distract from the sheer breadth of content …
Dec 18
One gloomy spring afternoon at the age of 13 I was feeling bored and restless, sitting at home roiling in adolescent malcontent, when I happened to pick up my brother’s copy of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island Of The Mind. I was instantly transfixed by the playfulness and whimsy combined with hard bitten cynicism. Here …
Dec 10
“They Said I Wasn’t College Material by Scot Young is a collection that spans time and circumstances, by a poet willing to resurrect the sting of assumptions and expectations to turn the lens in the other direction. He challenges social gatekeeping, and the classist label culture that nurtures the privileged and pushes the rest of …
Oct 20
BY JASON WEBBER/THE BLADE Dan Denton does not imbibe alcohol. Seated at a table in The Attic, Denton, sips Red Bull and cranberry juice, a far cry from the beer swilling protagonist of his new novel The Dead and the Desperate, which was just published by local imprint Roadside Press. On Saturday at 2:30 p.m., …
Oct 17
If you have liked Dan Denton’s poetry, or if you liked his first novel, you know what you’re in for. And guess what? There’s even more now: he has grown much as a writer since, and this novel is even more important. You might think, as you begin to read Dan Denton’s THE DEAD AND …
Oct 10
The Beats and later Charles Bukoswki cleared the way for the working class poet, the outlaw writer, and the mental outsider to enter literature. After Buk died in 1994 no one has really replaced his mantle. In the vacuum has swelled a generation of writers who seem to think if they get drunk and write …
