What is a world? Jean-Luc Nancy proposes it is a “totality of meaning.” Sliced worlds be. Mountain world. As far as eye can see world? As far as I can mean world. Can find meaning? Glacial till world? Moraine world? World out my window which is pine, steel, lumin, wind, fringe of curtain. How does...

Daljit Nagra, pictured here with Priscilla Uppal in Calgary for WordFest last month. Hear the charming Nagra discuss and read from the title poem Look we have coming to Dover!, which won the Forward Prize: Swarms of us, grafting in the black within shot of the moon’s spotlight, banking on the miracle of sun to...

You have to love Etgar Keret. Wristcutters, based on a Keret short story, looks like it actually translates Keret’s freshness to the screen.

Burning the candle at both ends these days, and something has to suffer. This week it’s the blog. But I’ve been thinking about work ethic…where it comes from. I’ve also been thinking of where I come from. A long line of peasants on both sides. Very little other than peasants a long, long way back....

San Diego County, the largest county in California without a fire department, relies on a hodgepodge of local departments that are almost all serving areas where populations are growing faster than their tax bases, and which are often low on money among a constituency that is generally allergic to taxes. Pay attention people: when you...

How did I miss this?? Haitian-American poet Phebus Etienne passed away this year. I met Phebus in 2000, at Hedgebrook on Whidbey Island, where she was compiling her manuscript, much of which she had written while at NYU. Beautiful, aching poems that traced her childhood in Haiti, and in East Orange, NJ, with her mother...

Just when I was beginning to give up on Helen Humphreys it looks like she has completely invigorated her approach to fiction with this new book…I must go and get this one. I have all the others, and some of them are fabulous, but I had decided that was it, I wasn’t going to get...

Danish poet Niels Hav, seen here at the University of Calgary with Priscila Uppal, has a new book out with Bookthug, translated by Patrick Friesen and P.K. Brask . One of the great potentials of festivals the size of WordFest is the attendance of people such as Hav, and in this case even greater since...

On the way to Banff I kept thinking of one of my favorite Anne Carson poems, included in Open Field. Here’s an excerpt from “Short Talk On Reading:” I glimpsed the stupendous clear-cut shoulders of the Rockies from between paragraphs of Madame Bovary. Cloud shadows roved languidly across her huge rock throat, traced her fir...

Really.

But if you’re in New York this is the reading to check out: Special Announcement: Contemporary Chinese Poetry Co-Sponsored by Belladonna* Another Kind of Nation: an Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Poetry , Talisman House Publishers, ed. by Zhang Er and Chen Dongdong, can be ordered from Talismaned@aol.com Oct. 16 and 17th at Poets House, NYC....