#14summerprompts: Contact
Prompt #2: Contact On the night bus home, I receive a tap on my shoulder from the person next to me. Pulling out my headphones, I turn my head towards him. He says, “you know you’re never going to...
These Dreams Are Actually from Other People: An Interview with Poet Michael V. Smith
Bad Ideas
Michael V. Smith
Nightwood Editions, 2017
Interview by Matthew Walsh
Bad Ideas, Michael V. Smith’s newest collection of poetry was just released with Nightwood Editions this year. Described on the first inner page as a “book of anxieties,” the book is full of little things: prayers and dreams that examine identity, queerness, and politics. It was great to catch up with the Lambda Literary Award finalist about his new work, and all his bad ideas.
#14summerprompts: Solstice
Prompt #1: Solstice Perhaps the only thing blistering is your tattered feet, clad in a new pair of Birkenstocks, expecting a sunny walk to the bus stop on June 20th, the day the calendar dictated as the first day...
The Suffering You Didn’t Have: On Hari Kunzru’s White Tears
White Tears
Hari Kunzru
Penguin Random House, 2017
Review by Will Preston
On a dark night in 1920s Mississippi, the story goes, the bluesman Robert Johnson walked out to the crossroads and sold his soul to the Devil. He was gifted with a preternatural ability to play the guitar in return: the strings bending beneath his fingers, his voice filled with what sounded like the anguish of generations. When he died mysteriously at 27, he left behind almost nothing, just a scattering of records and a swirling fog of myths. Johnson’s songs feel bracingly authentic to this day, filled with the violence and repression facing blacks in the Depression-era South. But the stories told of his life are anything but authentic. Johnson’s identity was hijacked in the decades after his death, largely by white fans eager to spread legends and half-truths about the voice in their record player. This was not an unusual legacy for black, pre-war blues musicians. “White urbanites reshaped the music to fit their own tastes and desires,” the historian Elijah Wald has written, “creating a rich mythology that often bears little resemblance to the reality of the musicians they admired.”
Continue reading The Suffering You Didn’t Have: On Hari Kunzru’s White Tears