Category: Literature

Poetry Monday June 4, 2018: Tony Hoagland
By Categories: Literature

photo: elizabeth jacobson

Tony Hoagland

Happy “busting-out” June, poetry-lovers.  Yes, it really is spring at last after a long cold winter here in New England, U.S.A.  To all of our readers, we have a real treat in store for you today.  It’s not the poetry of Tony Hoagland, although all his poems are certainly that; it’s his prose.  I’ve read and enjoyed his poems for many years, but recently discovered a book of his whose title does not do it justice.  Twenty Poems That Could Save America … (Graywolf Press, 2014) is a brilliant collection of essays by a man who really knows what is and is not happening in the poetry world today.  I have no idea why it took me nearly four years to discover this book, except that I was busy trying to do many of the things he talks about here.

Now about what we have for you today.  More brilliance and insight, this time from the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) magazine March/April 2018 issue.  I was so delighted with this article that I could even forgive him for not knowing about our anthology, Climate of Opinion: Sigmund Freud in Poetry, Edited and with an Introduction by Irene Willis (IP Books, 2017).  I’m sure if he had he would have included it in his references, just as I would have included some of the other wonderful examples he mentions.  Nevertheless, we made happy contact, and he gave us permission to re-print the article, so here, I am delighted to say, it is. You of a psychiatric persuasion will gobble it up – or drink it down.  Hooray!!

Irene Willis
Poetry Editor

Click Here to Read: “What You See is Nothing Compared to the Root”: Images of the Psyche in Contemporary Poetry Tony Hoagland.

 

 

Featured Book of the Week: Streets 1970 by Merle Molofsky from IPBooks
By Categories: Literature

Click Here to Purchase: Streets 1970 by Merle Molofsky.

For a special offer to purchase the book at 20% off, please email Psypsa@aol.com

Streets 1970, by Merle Molofsky: An Unfortunate, Uncanny Relevance

Streets 1970, a novel written in 1971 and published by IP Books in 2015, is a gritty, street-savvy, poetic account of the heroin epidemic in New York City in 1970. The main characters are heroin addicts, looking for what Allen Ginsberg termed the next “angry fix”, and struggling to find meaning in a life of poverty and crime. Today, in 2018, the United States is in the grip of a virulent opioid epidemic. The New York Times reported, May 29, 2018, that there is “a mounting epidemic that involves prescription opioids, and, increasingly, illegal opioid compounds like heroin and counterfeit forms of fentanyl”. Molofsky’s compassion and depth of understanding in telling her story chimes chillingly with the crisis we face today. We can learn a lot from this unfortunate, uncanny relevance.

Philip Roth
By Categories: Literature

Click Here to Read: Roth in the Review by The Editors in the New York Review of Books Blog on May 23,2018.

Click Here to View: The Last Word: Philip Roth By Erik Olsen and Mervyn Rothstein on the New York Times website on May. 23, 2018.

Click Here to Read: Philip Roth, a Born Spellbinder and Peerless Chronicler of Sex and Death By Dwight Garner
in The New York Times on May 23, 2018.

Click Here to Read:  Philip Roth and the narrow framework of postwar cultural life By David Walsh on the World Socialist Web Site on May 24, 2018.

Click Here to Read: The Adventures of Philip Roth: In his new novel, as throughout his career, the prolific, still-fresh author achieves but intermittent mastery over his own unexamined by Norman Podhoretz in Commentary Magazine on October 1, 1998.