Our blog’s “Gone Local” series aims to explore who and what the Ithaca area’s literary community has to offer. Be it bookstores, publishers, or local authors, each contributes invaluably to the bookish zeitgeist. Recently, Swenson Book Development contacted Larson Publications (of Burdett, NY) to get an independent publisher’s views on the literary business, the craft, and the community. Larson Publications started in 1982 as a… [Read More]
An endless loop of images, sounds, and events play in the theatre of my horrified mind. Specific details brand themselves red hot into memory. The hour, the day, the week, the month, the year, the decade before it happened replay backward and forward as my mind searches for clues to the mystery of my lover’s suicide two years ago. As a reader, I rode a… [Read More]
“A novel, biography, and memoir, all/three going at once.” This is how Kirsten Wasson describes her mother’s voracious literary appetite in the poem “One Way to Read.” The two lines, however, could well have been written to describe the author’s new collection of poems, Almost Everything Takes Forever, published by Antrim House Books. It is a lush, lithe, witty, emotionally frank series of postcards from… [Read More]
Guantanamo Boy (Albert Whitman, 2011 reprint) is the story of a teenager in the wrong place at the wrong time in a dangerous political climate. It’s a story of closed ears, fearful eyes and silent mouths. A story in which the small kindnesses buried deep in the heart have the power to keep a person alive, like the power of a good book (a Reader’s… [Read More]
Tea Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife: A Novel, Random House, March 2011 Grandfather recently died. He died alone on a trip away from home in a town where no one expected him to be. Tea Obreht opens her novel with her protagonist, Natalie, searching to escort her grandfather’s soul home during those 40 days after the spirit passes from the body. Her grandmother is shocked by… [Read More]
Swenson Book Development, LLC is pleased to announce that starting in September our blog will begin featuring three weekly articles or columns. Here’ what we have planned for our subscribers to receive on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings. Tuesday: For the love of books Those who publish and sell books for more than the sake of a lousy buck are today’s unsung heroes. Ithaca… [Read More]
Retired teacher and native son of Homer, New York, Martin Sweeney has written a captivating account of three other native sons who played pivotal roles in Abraham Lincoln’s presidency and the United States’ history. Just released from McFarland & Company is Lincoln’s Gift from Homer, New York: A Painter, an Editor and a Detective. The painter, Francis Carpenter, brushed “The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation… [Read More]
“Thousands have lived without love, not one without water,” W.H. Auden, First Things First. Emotions run high in the issues involving ‘hydrofracking’ in the southern tier of New York State. The Marcellus Shale deposits of natural gas are extracted using the force of water and sand mixed with a secret toxic mix of chemicals to fracture the shale and release the gas. Greed, jealousy, betrayal,… [Read More]
I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart’s core. W.B. Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” Last Sunday, as part of the 9th Works-In-Progress reading at Buffalo Street Books, local writer… [Read More]
The collaborative effort of Victoria Boynton (poet) and Marney Lieberman (artist), entitled “Contraptions,” reminds me of a game that the Surrealists used to play at dinner parties. In this game, one person would write a word or draw a portion of a picture on a sheet of paper. The paper would then be folded over, so no one else could see its contents, and passed to the next guest. This person would write a word or draw another part of a picture on the blank space below the paper’s fold. After all the dinner guests had made their contributions, the paper would be unfolded, and there it was: a microcosm of the creative power of the unconscious mind.
Perhaps this book is itself a “contraption” for accessing the untapped resources of the heart. Using the delicate balance of poetry and art, Boynton and Lieberman hold a séance to call forth “our dark hearts and our light hearts,” and decide to “welcome whatever comes.” Beyond this, though, I am fascinated by the fact that it seems Boynton was playing a Surrealist party game all by herself. Sometimes even Boynton has no idea what is coming next in her poem, nor what has come before. Thus, the poet and the reader unfold the paper together.
Boynton is uninterested in giving a guided tour of the emotions, objects, ideas and imaginings which she catalogues so thoroughly and so irregularly throughout the book. The reader feels much the same as the narrator of “Contraption: missing part,” who spends the entire poem wandering through aisles of parts and pieces, searching for the right one. The mistake, for the narrator and the…
