Currently Browsing: poetry
On Charlotte by David Foenkinos
(translated from French by Sam Taylor)
Guest Post by Martha Anne Toll
Today’s FF2 SWAN-of-the-Day is Charlotte Salomon who was born in Berlin (Germany) on this day in 1917.
Visual artist Charlotte Salomon was 26 and pregnant when she was murdered at Auschwitz. Her violent death spotlights a short, brilliant artistic life.… read more.
FF2 Guest Post by Joycelyn Ghansah
Books have always been my comfort zone, but I’ve noticed that poetry was one area of literature that I rejected in the past. In my experience, the poetry we were required to read in high school was great, but it wasn’t made for me. So, I spent most of my time avoiding poetry until relatively recently.… read more.
In a dream, I am Bridget Talone. I have written The Soft Life — a book of poems that speaks for itself. I fold myself up into it, a letter to keep your page. I wake up.
***
I love this book so much it hurts.
I read a poem. I’m overwhelmed. It is so good. There is so much goodness in it. It is exquisitely, painfully, good to read.… read more.
On October 8, 2021 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan opened a new exhibition: Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure. By the time the exhibition closed — on January 10, 2022 – the artist had passed. The fact that Etal was 96 when she died made the cultural moment all the more triumphant — a perfect capstone to an illustrious career.… read more.
The news cycle spins like a washing machine in the final stages of a heavy-duty wash. It’s been speeding up for decades, while we watch from the other side of the thick glass door, helpless, hoping our clothes come out clean but doubting they will. The apocalypse has arrived, probably, in the form of climate crisis fueled by unimaginable wealth disparity, or in the daily heartbreaks that we don’t want to believe keep happening: school shootings, protestors arrested for defending their ancestral land from developers, threats to Roe v.… read more.
In the last book she published while alive, Shifting The Silence, writer and multi-disciplinary artist Etel Adnan declares: “I am not in a hurry to live, I am not in a hurry to die; I am just talking to you.”
The stream of consciousness that flows throughout the intimate prose of the publication is one that collapses together the looming uncertainty of death with the calm simplicity of living the everyday.… read more.