Author: Stephen Page.

Stephen Page is from Detroit. He is part Shawnee and part Apache. He is the author of three books of poetry - A Ranch Bordering the Salty River, The Timbre of Sand, and Still Dandelions. He holds two AA’s from Palomar College, a BA from Columbia University, and an MFA from Bennington College. He also attended Broward College. His literary criticisms have appeared regularly in the Buenos Aires Herald, How Journal, Gently Read Literature, North of Oxford, and the Fox Chase Review. His fiction has been published in Quarto, The Whistling Fire, and Amphibi. He is the recipient of The Jess Cloud Memorial Prize, a Writer-in-Residence from the Montana Artists Refuge, a Full Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, an Imagination Grant from Cleveland State University, and an Arvon Foundation Ltd. Grant. He loves his wife, travel, family, and friends.

When Books Find You

I was waiting outside the grocery store for my wife, because Coronavirus-time rules here state that only one family member can enter the store at a time, and it was her turn. It was a sunny late autumn afternoon and I was walking around the parking lot for exercise, and I happened to walk by a magazine stand when this book caught my eye. I read the blurbs on the back and was so intrigued I asked the stand attendant how much it cost. “Fifty Pesos,” he said (“hmm, that’s only one dollar and a few pennies in U.S. currency” I thought, “and it is a literary novel written in English in a Spanish-speaking country. Is this a deal or what, and is this a coincidence, or did this novel find me?” I paid the attendant, carried the book to our vehicle, and put it in my backpack, right next to my journal. Now it will be my outside-of-the-house reader and . . . “Ladies Coupé” by Anita Noir – http://anitanair.net

So You Want to Talk about Race — Literature With Lady Grey

It took months on the library waitlist for me to obtain the audiobook for So You Want to Talk about Race. Written by Ijeoma Oluo, this book is one of the best foundational texts addressing racism in the U.S. and how we can begin to fight against it, creating a more safe and equitible society […]

via So You Want to Talk about Race — Literature With Lady Grey

‘Shirley’ review: Elisabeth Moss is at the center of a masterpiece thriller about a famed horror writer

By KATIE WALSH TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE | JUN 02, 2020 | 10:41 AM

The first exchange in the brilliant, brutal “Shirley” is telling about what’s to come. A young woman, Rose (Odessa Young), finishes reading a short story (“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson) and recounts the tale to her husband, Fred (Logan Lerman). “That’s creepy,” he observes. “It’s terrific,” she sighs. And so begins this creepy and terrific film about horror/mystery writer Jackson, portrayed here by Elisabeth Moss with her singularly feral ferocity.

Director Josephine Decker takes a bruising screenplay written by Sarah Gubbins, adapted from a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell, and delivers nothing less than a masterpiece, a powerhouse of performance, style and subtext. It is witchy and wordy and bracingly feminist; it is disorienting and strangely erotic and unpredictable. It feels “thrillingly horrible” at times, the term Rose uses to describe “The Lottery” to Shirley, winning her over.

Obit by Victoria Chang

North of Oxford

By Charles Rammelkamp

Written in the slender, right-justified form of newspaper columns, so familiar to readers of obituaries, these poems are no less lyrical for their journalistic form. Two events inform these poems. “My Father’s Frontal Lobe,” the first poem, begins:

My Father’s Frontal Lobe – died

unpeacefully of a stroke on June 24,

2009 at Scripps Memorial Hospital in

San Diego, California.

The second poem, “My Mother,” begins:

My Mother died unpeacefully on August 3, 2015 in her room at Walnut Village Assisted Living in Anaheim, California, of pulmonary fibrosis.

These two dates, June 24, 2009, and especially August 3, 2015, recur again and again as Chang writes the obituaries for what has been lost – “Victoria Chang” died June 24, 2009: “Because he did / not die but all of his words did.” In the first poem, “My Father’s Frontal Lobe,” she has written:

. …

View original post 862 more words

The Yellow Impala

Great short story/non-fiction piece here, by Rustin Larson.

I keep seeing my father drive around town in a yellow 1975 Chevrolet Impala. This is fine as far as most people (who don’t know my father) are concerned—it’s just that my brothers and I buried dad in November, 2001. For several very practical reasons, dad should be quietly resting in the cemetery and not tooling around town.

I often catch sight of him when I’m driving one of the kids somewhere, to school or some activity. He will be driving in the opposite direction, his ears cocked and his eyes tuned to space as if he were listening to the radio, trying to catch the college basketball scores or something. His face is drawn and empty as when I last saw him alive, in his hospital bed, asking for a sip of apple juice.

…read the rest here: https://rustinlarson.wordpress.com/2008/10/24/the-yellow-impala/

The Margot Affair

Sanaë Lemoine‘s debut novel, The Margot Affair, to be released mid June and available for preorder now in hardcover or on Kindle.

Hardcover: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/…/the-margot-affair-by-…/

Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Margot-Affair-Novel-San…/…/1984854437

Brief synopsis:

A Parisian coming of age tale from a bright new voice in literary fiction.

French teenager Margot is the illegitimate daughter of a prominent stage actress and an influential politician. The comings and goings of their unconventional family, in a small Parisian apartment, cast her whole life under a veil of secrecy and shame.

One summer, Margot decides to exercise her own agency when she meets a well-regarded journalist whose trust seems surprisingly easy to gain. But as Margot is drawn into an adult world, she learns how one impulsive decision can change the contours of her life, and the lives of those around her, in ways she could never have imagined.

In this simmering debut Sanae Lemoine explores private and public faces, truth and deceit, love and persuasion. The Margot Affair is a novel about the bone-deep bond between mothers and daughters, the devotion and betrayal of friendship and the dangers of pushing beyond the boundaries of a life lived in the shadows.

Prose Poem by Mac Greene

Charlotte Digregorio's Writer's Blog

A Writer’s Lament or Ten Years Among the Wordmongers

Dedicated to David Shumate and Tracy Mishkin

by Mac Greene

So, here I am, a word bumbler trying to transform into an emerging writer, crawling through the smashing surf onto one of the endless islands in the Archipelago Poetico. My Grand Canyon poem washes up in Hawaii. The zombie piece rots on Deadman’s Rock. Several haiku gardens blossom in Japonesia. I land a Christmas tree and a raft of ravens on Wilderness Isle, just as waves slam me down and pull me back to sea. My chapbook lights up the phosphorescentalgae, and then fizzles in the pounding waves. Drums and orators vociferate around all-night campfires on SlamBam as my rap poem bobs in a craft beer bottle. I steer clear of the broken crags and ivory towers of MFAland, especially Solipsism Reef and Overly Mannerd.
Writers emerge from water spouts and…

View original post 108 more words

long winter – hope during the pandemic

Hi. I thought this might construe to ‘hope’ regarding the current global crisis.

long-winter–
a male cardinal
passes a seed to its mate

by Stephen Page

thanks to Caroline Skanne, Editor

hedgerow: a journal of small poems #123

#123—the spring print issue is here! : https://hedgerowhaiku.com/…/123-the-spring-print-issue-is-…/

Caroline Skanne Hedgerow: a journal of small poems Stephen Page

A poem by Emily Dickinson — Poem Today

After great pain, a formal feeling comesAfter great pain, a formal feeling comes –The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?The Feet, mechanical, go round –A Wooden wayOf Ground, or Air, or Ought –Regardless grown,A Quartz contentment, like a stone –This is the Hour…

via A poem by Emily Dickinson — Poem Today