driftlessarearev

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Koh has written an engaging personal history of a mundane supermarket staple.

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Excess and Ascesis @ thethepoetryblog

Excess and Ascesis: Two Feminist Visionary Poets Vow, by Kristina Marie Darling The Blue Rental, by Barbara Mor “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” 1 Timothy 11 -12, The Bible, King James Version “Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque revenit.” “You can drive nature out with a pitchfork,…

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Democracy is not for the People, by Josef Kaplan @thethepoetryblog

Are Michael Bay’s Transformers movies and the trend of using drones for assassination part of the same moral sickness?

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Blog Update May 2025

Why are there so many dead links? I recently received a message that the New York Journal of Books (NYJB) is shut down. Why is that? The short answer had to do with escalating web hosting costs, tariff war, etc. In any case, I will begin the epic process of uploading my NYJB reviews directly on to the Driftless Area Review. Previously, I did a similar task when the Chicago Center for Literature…

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This is my personal attempt to construct a Canon of Intersectionality.

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Colgate, through the use of accessibility symbology, turns what would be a standard collection of poems into a simulacra of a museum visit.

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The Relativity of Living Well, by Ashna Ali, is an angry and tender poetic screed written in the dark shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City.

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Adventures in Intersectionality: Part 2: Personal Taste(s)

For the purposes of this essay, I’m going to let my guard down. At least a little. It’s not some full-on confession or complete demographic profile. I will avoid doing this for two reasons. The first is a protective and defensive measure. With AI and whatever other third-party malevolence scraping internet content, I’m not going to feed it my full personal profile. Second, if you want to…

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Normal is a trap. It’s also boring.

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Perestroika is a powerful fable about the liberating nature of art and the desire for representative democracy. It is dulled by endless monologuing by cardboard characters.

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The Franklin Stove “offers a multifaceted history of Franklin’s invention. Equal parts biography, design history, and environmental history, the book proves its worth by being highly relevant to today’s climate crisis.”

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Hypochondria by Will Rees is his attempt to chronicle his condition and an exploration of the phenomenon known as hypochondria.

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Wednesday Poetry Corner: At the End of the World There Is a Pond: Poems, by Steven Duong @ NYJB

“Love and death, suffering and addiction, family and displacement, all become interwoven into a commentary on the present intractable mess. Duong’s poetry assesses the situation with a jaundiced eye, yet his perspective also includes a stubborn hopefulness.”

“Love and death, suffering and addiction, family and displacement, all become interwoven into a commentary on the present intractable mess. Duong’s poetry assesses the situation with a jaundiced eye, yet his perspective also includes a stubborn hopefulness.”

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CRITICAL APPRAISALS: RADICAL VOICES: CASCELLA, ROBERTSON, BROSSARD, Part 3

Singed can be seen as a chimera and a rhizomatic desiring-machine.

Via THE VOICE OF SILENCE “Silence like a cancer grows.” – Simon & Garfunkel Singed is a tiny monument of literary hybridity. Its title is a pun involving burning (sinjed) and a voice (singed). It is polymorphous and polyphonic. By turns, an incantation, an inventory, an archive binge, a fictionalized memoir, and a meditation on music and literature (including the pop, high, and low of both).…

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CRITICAL APPRAISALS: RADICAL VOICES: CASCELLA, ROBERTSON, BROSSARD, Part 2

Despite the fakeness of authenticity, can one find authenticity in artifice?

Via THE CUT-OUT AND THE ENIGMA OF AUTHENTICITY One of the products of the September 11 terrorist attacks was the alleged era of “The New Authenticity.”* As the Twin Towers fell, so, apparently did irony and the cynical anomie of jaded Nineties Gen-Xers. I call bullshit. As Brossard wrote, “thus sparkles the artifice and exposes itself.” I would argue that there’s nothing more fake and…

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CRITICAL APPRAISALS: RADICAL VOICES: CASCELLA, ROBERTSON, BROSSARD

Via Singed, by Daniela Cascella (Equus Press, 2017) The Baudelaire Fractal, by Lisa Robertson (Coach House Books, 2020) Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader, edited by Sina Queyras, Geneviéve Robichaud, and Erin Wunker (Coach House Books, 2020) “But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” — 1 Timothy 2:12 KJV “Whereof one cannot speak,…

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Annihilation, by Michel Houellebecq @ NYJB

Annihilation does provoke and offend and dazzle.