I believe in the image, the line, the stanza, the iambic foot, the perfect word. Assonance, slant rhymes, that the formal forms still have a place in modern poetry. I believe that Shakespeare wrote the plays. I believe in a constitutional amendment outlawing poetry about poetry and the use of the word “suffuse.” I believe …
Author Archives: lara
Books of June
A writer’s notes about books. Here are the books I read and listened to in June. Read: A Brief History of Seven Killings — Marlon James In which there are a damned sight more than seven killings. Some of the narrative is true in a broad sense. The politics of Jamaica, the US efforts to direct Latin …
Things I’ve Learned Since Grade School — Dialog Commas
I’ve always had an unreasonably intimate, if somewhat stormy, relationship with punctuation. On one hand I want punctuation to make sense — to be useful, predictable, and consistently applicable. On the other hand I want to be able to make use of it for my own ends — to fudge, push, pull, invert, and subvert …
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All In
Recently, after many years of being away from the art of putting pieces of fabric together with lengths of thread, I bought a new sewing machine. A sewing machine that requires not one but two getting acquainted classes for the new user, and whose owner’s manual is considerably larger than the one for the Dodge …
Calamari
I don’t like calamari. It’s not a big deal, but it’s emphatic. I really don’t like the stuff. It’s rubbery and unpleasant in the mouth and it tastes like dead fish. So I don’t like calamari. I’m surrounded by people who loooove calamari so I can’t figure out why I don’t. And every five or …