Sonora Review

Dispatches from a Skater Photog

Joel — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:40:04 +0000

All I could do was breath sighs of relief. I arrived in Tucson ten hours late and waited at A Shot in the Dark, a 24/7 café, until the Roadrunner hostel opened for registration. It was a painful six hours trying to stay awake.

The closest skate park was the Ott Family YMCA, open from 5-9pm at the cost of $10 [it has a separate entrance and the guy staffing didn’t check receipts…just saying]. Kneepads and helmets are required, but they have some on hand [mostly kids’ sizes]. The park has a smooth cement pour with a deep combination bowl, a smaller bowl, and some lines in the street course. While I skated, Bryan, the hostel’s vegan chef, made me a plate of super tasty tacos for after my session.

The next morning I hopped the Greyhound to Austin.

Bird Island

Joel — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:33:44 +0000

If you haven’t read it yet, take a look-see at Dan Moreau’s Directions. It’s a subtle little thing that can control then disarm the reader. Shades of the music video for Bird Island, dir. by Will Blank, a good friend of the Review.

Bird Island Video by Roman Ruins – MySpace Video.

RIP

adialectic — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:02:29 +0000

Goodbye Sparklehorse

adialectic — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:31:43 +0000

adialectic — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 21:30:07 +0000

short short short story by Dan Moreau

Joel — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:53:04 +0000

Directions

Take the ferry across the bay. Stand on the stern where the gulls gather like bees. Do not throw bread at them. This will give you away as a tourist. When the ferry docks, get in your car and drive to the end of the road. Hang a right. If you see flashing lights and train tracks you have gone too far. The house will appear on your right. Park across the street. Come up the back steps. Past the split wood pile. Knock on the sliding glass door so I know it is you.

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Bio: Dan Moreau’s work appears or is forthcoming in Redivider, McSweeney’s, and Los Angeles Review. A 2009 Pushcart nominee, he blogs at dlmoreau.wordpress.com.

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send short short short stories (under 100 words) to jersmith@email.arizona.edu … include a bio (short) if you’d like your piece published with one. i like it when things happen in the story. so make it happen.

POG READING

jmlevine4u — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:37:15 +0000

March 7, 2010: Sunday, 4 PM – Michael Palmer, Andrew Joron, and Andrew Zawicki – Reading their Poetry at The Eric Firestone Gallery Exhibition and Event Space, 403 N 6th Ave (at the corner of 7th St, map), just north of the 6th Ave underpass in downtown Tucson. This event is cosponsored by POG, Chax Press, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. Phone Chax Press at 520-620-1626 for information. $5 admission, $3 students

This event is possible due to the presence of the presenting poets in Tucson for Words Through: A Tribute to Gustaf Sobin (1935-2005), which will be held Saturday, March 6, at 3:00 pm at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

Michael Palmer Born in Manhattan, poet and translator Michael Palmer has lived in San Francisco since 1969. He has worked with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company for over thirty years and has collaborated with many visual artists and composers. His most recent poetry collections are Codes Appearing (Poems 1979-1988) (New Directions, 2001) and Company of Moths (New Directions, 2005). His selected essays and talks, Active Boundaries, was published by New Directions in 2008. In 2006, he received the Wallace Stevens Prize from the Academy of American Poets. He has taught at various universities in the United States and Europe, and his writings have been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

Andrew Joron is the author of Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems (City Lights, 2010). After a decade and a half spent writing science-fiction poetry, culminating in his volume Science Fiction (Pantograph Press, 1992), Joron began to elaborate other forms of lyric speculation. This work has been collected in The Removes (Hard Press, 1999), Fathom (Black Square Editions, 2003), and The Sound Mirror Flood Editions, 2008. The Cry at Zero, a selection of his prose poems and critical essays, was published by Counterpath Press in 2007. Joron is also the translator, from the German, of the Marxist-Utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch’s Literary Essays (Stanford University Press, 1998). He lives in Berkeley.

Andrew Zawacki is the author of the poetry books Petals of Zero Petals of One (Talisman House), Anabranch (Wesleyan), and By Reason of Breakings (Georgia). His recent chapbooks include Lumièrethèque (Blue Hour), Glassscape (Projective Industries), Roche limit (tir aux pigeons), and Bartleby’s Waste-book (PS). He is coeditor of Verse, and his translation of Sébastien Smirou, My Lorenzo, is forthcoming from Burning Deck.

adialectic — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:03:26 +0000

Will 2010 be the resurfacing of the confessional in poetry? Is there anything to confess anymore? In the time of the “PC,” can we confess with honesty? Drugs, sex, race, gender, & more… has it all been confessed? Are poets like Tao Lin new confessionalists? Can we turn the shit of our secrets into holy light?

short short short story by Jacob Silverman

Joel — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:02:12 +0000

A man driving an old blue car almost runs me over. He needs directions to the hospital. I understand the third time. “For the child”–his bony hand jabs her shoulder. A boy in the backseat stares at me, eyes like cracked marbles, waiting to go home. They buried his mother under a white wooden cross by the river, dark and shimmering with oil slicks. Her husband used goat’s blood to write the epitaph because there was no paint. The makeshift ambulance pulls away; talk radio mumbles goodbyes. A child’s fingers dance out the window, playing in the indifferent traffic.

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Bio: Jacob Silverman is a writer and a contributing online editor at VQR. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bookforum, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, Bookslut, and other publications. His website is www.jacobsilverman.com.

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John Hawkes: An Appreciation

sonorareview — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:18:57 +0000

Jim Shepard has written an excellent appreciation of the late John Hawkes, who is probably (IMO) one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century. Nobody wrote like he did. He wrote the most nightmarish fiction I can possibly think of, weird dreamlike wordscapes in which characters seemed to float from point to point, regardless of their own intentions. A good starting point would be Travesty, which is probably the most comprehensible of his novels; follow that up with The Lime Twig, which is generally considered his masterpiece. If you like those, read the rest. It’s all good.

–Jon