August was mostly a craft book month. Poetry being the craft of the moment. Books I read: How to Read a Poem and Fall In Love with Poetry — Edward Hirsch (1999) I’m not sure that this book will make anyone who isn’t already crushing on poetry fall in love. But if you are crushing on …
Author Archives: lara
It’s Still a Big Damn Country
Recently I was looking for this picture of an artfully rusted steam engine that I took during a cross-country trip in 2009. Rather than dig through the many thousands of photographs on the back-up server, I searched through the series of blog entries titled It’s a Big Dam Country that I wrote while on that road …
The Books of July
July was a thin month for books. I had a week in Port Townsend for the Centrum writer’s conference and some personal issues to attend to. But I did get through a few things. Books I Read: The Hatred of Poetry — Ben Lerner (2016) The most often quoted bit in the reviews of this book …
Nuke and Pave…
… is an old computer term for removing all of the software from the hardware and starting over again. Back when we could rm ‑rf we would occasionally find that a system had got itself into a non-recoverable state and need to be rebuilt from the ground up in order to function again. Or on …
The Books of June
Books I read in June: Cleaning Up New York — Bob Rosenthal (1976) Referred to as a cult classic. I don’t get it. You expect a cleaning memoir to have good stories about clients and the occasional cleaning tip. This one has both but doesn’t manage to make either of them interesting. * I just don’t …