Published by Black Lawrence Press in November 2020, Lindsay Illich’s poetry collection, Fingerspell, begins by presenting the images for spelling out the letters of the alphabet. After the birth of Illich’s daughter, who has Down syndrome, she “felt every emotion as if through a vivid filter, supersaturated”.
The Best Prey (Pleiades Press, 2021), Paige Quiñones’s debut poetry collection and winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, contain poems that pulse to a provocative beat. It’s a rhythm that edges on the powerful intersection of danger and desire.
During the 2-month lockdown in Madrid, a picture book arrived for me in the mail: Carson Ellis’s Home. And while we are no longer in strict lockdown, I still spend much more time at home than I ever have before. I think about home much more than I ever have before.
Jazmina Barrera’s first book to be translated into English by Christina MacSweeney, On Lighthouses, is an exploration of many things—writing, collecting, travel, literary history—centered around various lighthouses and the stories they contain. The following is a conversation between author Jazmina Barrera, translator Christina MacSweeney, and WD contributor Katy Dycus.
The New York Times recently published an article: “Books Have Literally Saved My Sanity”: Readers Respond to Our Letter to the Literary Community.” This got me thinking. What use are the literary arts—and the people who think and talk about them—in a moment of crisis?
Katy Dycus in conversation with poet, Kathryn Nuernberger. She’ll be performing on March 11th at Inner Moonlight, our poetry reading series.
Katy Dycus reviews local poet Mike Soto’s Dallas Spleen, one of three chapbooks produced as a part of Deep Vellum’s Central Track Writers Project.
Katy Dycus in conversation with poet, Alexandra Corinth. She’ll be performing on December 11th at Inner Moonlight, our poetry reading series.
Lindsey Tramuta’s debut bestselling book, The New Paris, offers a collection of insights into the evolving tastes shaping the City of Light.
“Medicine is my lawful wife; literature is my mistress,” wrote Anton Chekhov, describing his life as both physician and writer.
According to Gerardo Diego, Antonio Machado “spoke in verse and lived in poetry.”
Megan Peak will be reading at our monthly poetry reading series, Inner Moonlight on November 14th.
Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė, a Lithuanian folksinger and songwriter, creates melodies that honor the traditions of her country. With the kanklės, a Baltic psaltery instrument, laid out horizontally across her lap, the musician paints fresh musical landscapes.
In assuming the guise of a different language, one can also assume a different persona. Svetlana Lavochkina, a Ukranian author residing in Leipzig, Germany, understands the voyage one makes in crossing from one language to another. From the age of 8, she dreamt of becoming a writer, but she knew she didn’t want to write in Russian, her native language; instead, she sought full creative expression in English.
I like to think of Desperate Literature as a transitional space between street and home. Co-owners Terry Craven and Charlotte Delattre see this space as completely fluid. “There’s little distinction between our private life and public life. It’s how we live and what we live for,” Charlotte says. “A very nice version of how we live.”
Most of us know the feeling of coming undone, of drifting through a sea of loneliness unanchored, unmoored. After a few cities, relationships, peregrinations, we struggle to find someone who knows our name, let alone remembers it, who can speak to us in a way that feels vaguely familiar, who knows us in a way we all desire to be known.
Our collaborator, Katy Dycus, interviews the WD’s resident illustrator at her house and studio in Almería, Spain.
John Ashbery passed away on September 3 at the age of 90. I can’t imagine him heeding Dylan Thomas’s call to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
At the 2012 Olympic Games in London, every country sent at least one woman competitor. An unprecedented event. In Rio de Janeiro last year, 45% of the 11,000 competing athletes were women. But more than 120 years ago, before Serena and Venus Williams, Katie Ledecky and Simone Biles were household names, the Olympic Games prohibited women’s involvement. There just wasn’t any space for women in the collective “public sphere.”
When Charles Dickens invited guests over for dinner, it was his tendency to take them on a little pre-dinner stroll. Some four hours later, the famished group returned back to his home for their later-than-planned meal. The ‘Sketches by Boz’ author was used to walking hours at a time. He sketched life by traversing it, gathering up material through close inspection of daily encounters.
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