The Blog

David Gessner's THE TARBALL CHRONICLES

Jeremy Griffin

As a native of Louisiana, I followed closely the events surrounding the 2010 BP oil spill. I remember the grisly footage of the black oil jet spurting up from the floor of the Gulf, and I recall the succession of fruitless strategies put into effect until finally the breach was contained. But most of all, I remember the feelings of frustration this evoked in residents, who were virtually powerless against the 68,000-square-foot slick decimating the ecosystem.

Sean Bishop's THE NIGHT WE'RE NOT SLEEPING IN

Patrick Whitfill

Sean Bishop’s debut collection of poems is not, as the foreword states, for the faint of heart. These are poems of longing and loss, of wishing and wishes, of desire, and of the unequivocally true knowledge that wishes do not, and will not, come true. These poems unsettle the ground and call into question our own connections with our family and with language, as well as our religious and secular understanding of the world. Throughout The Night We’re Not Sleeping In, we have a speaker trying to be heard by an absent father, an absent god, or his fellow partners in suffering. At times, the speaker seeks forgiveness:

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's WRITING ACROSS THE LANDSCAPE

Yunte Huang

“Why do I voyage so much? And write so little?” Lawrence Ferlinghetti asked himself as he sat on a bus in Mexico, traveling from Manzanillo to Guadalajara, surrounded by women with hands like hens’ feet, amused by the sound of a rooster onboard or a goat “crying in a stubble field behind some house.” As the ancient bus climbed even more ancient mountain roads, Ferlinghetti—poet, publisher, beatnik—continued to scribble in his journal dated May 19, 1972: “The travel between the lines is enormous, whole passages left unsaid.