In Review: The Week of May 28th

On the Blog

~ Poet David James Brock took us through some of the prog rock and classic sci-fi inspirations for the cover of his latest Ten-Headed Alien (Wolsak & Wynn). ~ We have the best of books and podcasts with these three perfect pairings. ~ Prairie poet Chelsea Coupal brings a new voice to the genre of Prairie poetry in her debut collection Sedley (Coteau Books) and to our ears in this edition of Poetry in Motion. ~ Our Short Story Month interviews continued with Mariam Pirbhai who describes her collection Outside People in a series of nouns like “A Compass, A Protest, An Elegy.”

Around the Web

~ Yanny or Laurel, blue-and-black or white-and-gold, tricks of perception might be more than just trivial internet debate.~ Further proof that books save lives: lesbian pulp fiction helped gay women in the 1950s and 1960s see that hope and community were possible.~ Show us a writer and we’ll show you a cat. What is the affinity between writers and cats?

via GIPHY

What Else We’re Reading

Christen just read Eric Schmaltz’s Surfaces (Invisible Publishing): Surfaces is Eric Schmaltz’s stunning debut collection, exploring writing through digital culture and featuring graphic elements, found poetry, experimental typography, and translation. The poems remind me of Derek Beaulieu and bpNichol’s concrete and visual work, and billboard poet Robert Montgomery. In the afterword, Joseph Mosconi reflects on how the reader is engaged to confront the textual experiments and think through contexts that lie beneath the surface encounters.