© Gilles Jourdan
READ MORE: Pierre-Albert Jourdan À la taverne d’Abû-Nuwâs Les Sandales de paille Sonnets à diverses personnes oiseaux de mauvais augure |
I am a scrappy old lion I walk big-shouldered, my head raised My roar goes back to the Serengeti, Don’t ask me how I know the signs engraved I know what it took to master the serpent & I am. When their eyes are on me — EXCERPT FROM When Eyes Are on Me |
— FROM Entre les moments invisibles / Between Invisible Moments
BY Olivier Schwartz |
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Opening Excerpt from Mural That’s What I’m Talking About Getting Out and Afterward Four New Poems It Arrives At the Bois de Boulogne |
Interview Betty Adcock I’ve listened to the talk among my husband’s serious musician friends, heard them argue and detail the way jazz works, and I know something of that has influenced my own approach to poetry … working on poems has a lot in common with jazz improvisation — the dialogue between the poet and his/her poem … being similar to the dialogue between the player and the tune, a “striking off” each other — the play between the conscious and the unconscious, the given and the new, pattern and then abandonment and return, the poet and other voices he/she hears. I feel very much at home among jazz people. And I discover that most of my poet friends are jazz buffs… — FROM Poetry is a Way of Seeing: |
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Someone tore a square out of the sidewalk — EXCERPT FROM Vegetation Blues 
Restraining a Cow / Attrappant une vache
(Taung, 1986) — FROM Le Blues de l’apartheid / Apartheid Blues BY José Bidarra |
MAMADOU NDIAYE, a photographer located in Indianapolis, Indiana, is originally from Senegal, Africa. He writes, “The shot entered into the deep silence and patience of a beautiful bird on the beach … He stood and posed for me for fifteen minutes. His mind was somewhere else.” Tom & Pete In the World of Levitating Halves Sustenance Retrieval Epistle |
 Poems from Paintings:  Make Something Happen:  Why Remember?  Dinner at Home  Apnea |
Vietnam / United States“I know we have only just met,” Dúc says in his slightly musical English, the strobe lights like lightning, “but I need a suitcase.” He pulls out a pack of Vietnamese cigarettes, the box dragon-red and elegant, private. On the dance floor people are wriggling to Madonna’s “Holiday.” Watching them, their liquored gyrations, you remember that in Vietnamese the word for dance is just one tone away from the word for puppets.
Dúc tamps a cigarette on the table filled with dirty glasses, lights it in his mouth, then offers it to you. The strobe lights have turned the world into an old black and white movie — you’re Bette Davis, Myrna Loy, Dietrich in some hole-in-the-wall cabaret just one town over from the Western front, the smoke streaming from your lips. Now would be the time to do some fancy trick, French inhale, the smoke on a continuous loop in and out of your nose. But you can’t so you don’t, your throat already burning from something in this Vietnamese cigarette, something bitter and foreign, something you never want to taste again. Dúc nods his head carefully to the music as though it were a cold bath, something he’s trying to get into. “Is it wrong for me to ask? Please say,” he says, his palms down flat on the table. You shake your head. “Good,” he says. “Let us meet in the parking lot by the student union. Say one o’clock tomorrow.” — FROM Freedom, WI |
Born in 1986 in New York City and raised in Massachusetts, IAN ALEKSANDER ADAMS fled to the south to study art and escape the ice. Among other projects, he creates large scale information-centric installation work and tiny word-light photo books. View more of his work at www.ianaleksanderadams.com, where he also features art criticism and general visual culture commentary. TexasIn the daytime Annika watched out of the lockshop window the zombie-eyed grackles, their eerie flashes of blue and green in the relentless sun, their relentless beaks on the glass. In the morning, Lizette opened the window to pour a line of corn on the sill to appease them, and Annika was always afraid one would flap its way in. Who knew what one of those things would do if it got inside? Dive straight for the eyes — Annika’s gray eyes, not so very lowered with guilt, or Luis’s carefully nonchalant and dark ones — to punish them for what they had done. — FROM In San Jacinto |
BoliviaIt is dangerous when it rains, Maria tells me by way of introduction. The whole city is built on sand. Houses fall every year. Water loses itself off the windshield, sky deep and cupped. Up in El Alto the city is an accident, tan building blocks spilled all over the mountain. I don’t know yet what holds us. I arrive in La Paz from Quito at night. The taxi descends into a bowl of lights. Bolivia’s independence day, groups crowded around backs of trucks. I am here to meet the Diva but she is still away; her daughters, Maria and Isa, wait with a sign at the airport. I say as we dip and dip that this is the one place where old people could say, When I was your age I had to walk uphill both ways to school, and actually be telling the truth. — FROM Disturbing the Spirits 
SUSAN LYNN SMITH‘s work has been featured at several venues in New York, including the Visual Studies Workshop, Gallery Henoch, Gulf and Western Gallery, The School at the International Center for Photography, and Cantor Film Center. Bay Area exhibitions include Depth of Perception (MarinMOCA), Eighteen Months: Taking the Pulse of Bay Area Photography (San Francisco City Hall), Inhabited (Diego Rivera Gallery), TASTE (Root Division), and On Second Thought (Fort Mason Center). She received a BFA from New York University and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Forthcoming exhibitions include Landscape Interrupted at Coconino Center for the Arts in Flagstaff, Arizona, and On Second Thought at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, California. Visit www.susanlynnsmith.com. |
Fiction
Poetry
Fine Arts
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Films La Meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth) A six-hour epic drama that chronicles the journey of the two Carati brothers and their family against the gripping historical backdrop of Italy from the sixties till today — this film is a true jewel in world cinema. With a meticulously and richly written text that reveals humanity in every emotion as well as breathtaking cinematography, you rejoice, cry, mourn, aspire and struggle with each personnage through these transformative years that are unrefutably The Best of Youth. — Greta Aart
 Joyeux Noël If “history existed only as spirit and not as an objective reality” (Modris Eksteins), the “taboo” episodes of fraternisation on different fronts among the French, German and Scottish soldiers on Christmas Eve 1914 are more than moments of goodwill, friendship and peace. Inspired by true historical events, this film re-questions the notion of authority, revealing a journey to the interior — in the no man’s land where a Christmas ode, however brief, was able to insurrect silence and respect. — Greta Aart
Nonfiction Corvus: A Life with Birds From a young age, the author learned not to have “any false ideas of the superior place human beings occupy in the world.” It is this rare view and Woolfson’s respectful curiosity and compassionate sensibility that lead to a life of living with uncaged birds in her home. Worth the price of the book alone is the story of Madame Chickeboumskaya (“Chicken”), a very intelligent and personable rook. Corvus is nature writing at its best. — Sally Molini
 The Long-Winded Lady: “New York does nothing for those of us who are inclined to love her except implant in our hearts a homesickness that baffles us until we go away from her, and then we realize why we are restless. At home or away, we are homesick for New York not because New York used to be better and not because she used to be worse but because the city holds us and we don’t know why.” With witty, nostalgic musings about New York in the sixties, Maeve Brennan the “Long-Winded Lady” sketches with a quick swerve of her pen, never failing in her signature elegance, sharpness, vibrance and humor. — Greta Aart
 The Periodic Table Though he was more reknown for Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi also wrote autobiographical essays using his background as a chemist. His analogies between the elements and his memories of friends, relatives and work-related incidents enchant the general reader as well as the science aficionado. They mine the “labyrinthine tangle” of the Piedmont region, among other locations. Levi converts the personal chaos of World War II into an homage to a seemingly unlikely candidate; like its forerunner alchemy, chemistry becomes a storied and often mysterious vocation. — Karen Rigby
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