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Adventures in Reading 2022
PART ONE: DISTRACTION AND ENCHANTMENT 2022 was unkind to my habit of reading lots of books. Partly my paid work was to blame: growing pains (which I am too old for) of the professional kind. Then there was the several weeks I wasted on Thomas Mann‘s Doctor Faustus, which I had to abandon. What drudgery! What a distraction! I’d read and admired a number of Mann’s short stories, but Doctor Faustus struck me as all posturing, a ponderous performance with no point in sight, almost every moment of it arriving via second- or third-hand reports about Mann’s fictional, Schoenbergian composer, Adrian Leverkühn.Read More
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Poetry of Stanley Moss (a 199-word review + samples)
There is no pleasure like a hot-spring bath. Ideally naked we slip into the steam and mineral cooking-egg smell of it, sliding bare buttocks down the slickly gnarled sloping rock until our chin rests on the amber surface of the water. If we pray, we pray to the forces of sacred nature, laughing and arguing as we might across the Thanksgiving table. We are part of their family. I lied in that first sentence. Reading Stanley Moss is a hot-spring pleasure—an escape into healing intensities, words kneading the aches from intellect, feeling, and spirit.Read More
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Fighting Fire with Fireproof Values
All proceeds from this auction will go to PEN America to support their efforts in support of the freedom to write and the freedom to read and be read.Read More
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Now and Then, by Murray Moulding (a 199-word review)
It had been a long day’s grind into inanition. In bed I tried reading but fell asleep. I got up a while later and walked in the dark. I knew all the sharp corners and the distribution of toe-bruising dangers—like the mini-grotto of amethyst crystals in a halved chunk of stone, the heavy meditating Buddha made of resin. But near the kitchen I bumped the dining room table and heard a muffled patter like a dropped jigsaw puzzle. I flicked on the light. Some jigsaw pieces lay scattered on the floor. Not many.Read More
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On Percival Everett’s The Trees (a 199-word review)
Clearly, Percival Everett’s longtime publisher, Graywolf Press, couldn’t quite figure out how to characterize his new novel, The Trees. On the back cover: “A blistering tale of revenge in the Deep South.” “Blistering,” a hype word from 1950s B-movie trailers. “Revenge,” yes! But: “In the Deep South”—well, the novel only begins there with gruesome murders and mutilations of white racists in Money, Mississippi, where Emmett Till was murdered in 1955. Yes, it’s all connected. But Money can’t contain the spirit of retribution fueled by American history. The real history, not the one we learned in school.Read More
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The First Review of 2022
The first review (5 stars) of Under Sleep’s New Moon just appeared on Amazon. Especially heartening because it was posted by fellow poet and novelist* Dan Guenther. Good notice is all the sweeter when it comes from another ink-stained wretch! _________________ * I realize that this phrase seems to imply that I am a novelist.Read More
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My Review in Pedestal Magazine
Check out my take on Dana Roeser’s new collection in issue 85 of Pedestal Magazine.Read More
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On David Giannini’s Mayhap: Selected Brief Poems
No American poet since William Stafford is as quotable as David Giannini. A tendency toward aphoristic piquancy layers and complicates all of his work. It’s not that he rejects simplicity; it’s simply that the world and the mind that perceives it are not simple, and Giannini is committed to complexity as part of his continual reach toward wholeness. Giannini’s new collection (his fourth from Dos Madres Press), Mayhap: Selected Brief Poems, is a fine example his commitment.Read More
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Two Items of Shameless Self-Promotion
I feel honored to have a poem in the latest, 17th anniversary issue of Pedestal Magazine. In good company, too, with many poets I admire: Kelli Russell Agodon, Joan Colby, John Bradley, Andrea Hollander, Jared Smith and more. Check it out! ~~~~~~~ Also, I wanted to steer y’all to Goodreads, where—with care and insight—Scots poet and fiction writer Jim Murdoch reviews The World As Is.Read More
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All I’ve Done For You, or The Return of Joanne Greenberg
The problem with being a writer who writes consistently beautiful prose over many years is that fashions in fiction come and go—or, more to the point, fashions in publishing, which, as an enterprise, has less and less interest in beautiful prose; the publishers’ interest tends more toward pleasing whatever demographic the marketing department has identified as the sweet spot.Read More
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
