Reviewed in this Sight-Reading: Croak, by Jenny Sampirisi. Coach House Press, 2011. Why did I introduce into the text all those extraordinary frogs and legs and things, all that fermenting matter, isolating them on the page only by the style, the cold and disciplined tone, and demonstrating to the reader how completely I dominated the ferment? –Witold Gombrowicz When opening up Jenny Sampirisi’s Croak (Coach House Books, 2011) it may help to approach the work as a new type of “species counterpoint”, a mutated version of ancient Greek drama in which the charming and often contentious voices of Frogs, Girls, and Narrators undergo fugal transformations and musical deletions, at times experiencing lyrical and linguistic disintegration: this is dd (zzz uff)… Keep reading

Hear this piece read by its author, Dylan Gordon: [Audio clip: view full post to listen] Reviewed in this essay: Ancestral Appetites: Food in Prehistory by Kristen J. Gremillion. Cambridge University Press, 2011. We humans have learned to eat a great number of foods, prepared in an ever more astounding variety of ways. And as Ancestral Appetites demonstrates, this range of fare has been critical to our health and well-being time and again, allowing us to weather periods of environmental and social change or collapse, including shifts in climate much more rapid than those we currently face. Drawing on the material evidence left by our forebears, Ancestral Appetites outlines how the ongoing diversification of human diet is both a cause… Keep reading

Hear this piece read by its author, Matthew Farish: [Audio clip: view full post to listen] Reviewed in this essay: Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base Little, Brown and Co., 2011. Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World. New American Library, 2010. For two days in 1996, the most compelling spectacle staged in Nevada was not the exploding, pina colada-fragranced volcano in front of the Mirage Casino, or the Siegfried and Roy show inside, but an extended highway dedication ceremony. In February, Nevada’s Transportation Board had approved a new name for State Route 375, a quiet stretch of pavement that passed through the tiny town… Keep reading

Reviewed in this essay: “Remembering September 11,” a concert by the Wordless Music Orchestra at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 11, 2011. William Basinski’s epic four-disc masterwork The Disintegration Loops emerged in 2002 with two backstories. First, Basinski, a little-known classically trained composer, was digitizing analog tape loops of twenty-year-old recordings when he noticed that he could hear these tapes physically degrading. As the iron oxide particles were, little by little, being scraped off the magnetic tape by the playback instrument, gaps began to appear in the music. Basinski recorded what he called “the death of this sweeping melody” as it gradually metamorphosed into silence. This recording became “dlp 1.1,” the sixty-three and a half minute opening… Keep reading

Hear this piece read by its author, Mary Albino: [Audio clip: view full post to listen] With baby Danica’s Halloween arrival, the planet’s population officially reached seven billion. It’s an estimate of course—the margin of error is six months in either direction—but the point is humanity has reached a milestone: there are twice as many people alive as there were fifty years ago. Instead of unleashing a sense of jubilation, the occasion seems to have generated panic. Would the planet sink under Danica’s extra five pounds, or explode from the carbon monoxide released from the bus her mom took home from the hospital? Some really did wonder. After all, how many more people can the planet support? When will we… Keep reading

Hear this poem read by its author, Nyla Matuk: [Audio clip: view full post to listen] Sunday Afternoon Croquet Trinity Bellwoods Park I feel like a mad Roman emperor with a history of failures at miniature golf. I’ll play at being truly imperious, a Pimm’s-sipping sundowner in a striped sweater with the entitlement to be that individual, who can dismiss Torremolinos and cruise the radio dial for swing jazz. I celebrate Dominion Day, and say old bean.   I’ll bend forward, a gauche hobby farmer, elphin green deviant bitchy lady, aiming for tiny stations of the cross as the Portuguese masquerade a masque of pascal ecstasies and triumphs somewhere else in the park.   Street dust settles onto the terra… Keep reading

TRB: Released in the spring of 2010, Alice for the iPad became a huge, Oprah-featured hit that is credited with convincing reading publics of how book apps could be even more fun and engaging than paper books. How many times has Alice been downloaded by now? Were you surprised by its reception? How have traditional book publishers and book reviewers reacted to it? CS: Alice is installed on over 500,000 iPads. The reception was a surprise, especially since most of the design work was done out of my bedroom in London. The initial reaction from traditional book publishers was one of awe and confusion. Alice was only out a few days before I found myself in a boardroom at HarperCollins… Keep reading

A woman’s head appears as she lies down directly below the camera, filling the frame with her face and shoulders. She stares into the lens as she adjusts herself, and we hear the sound of her unbuckling and unzipping her pants. We see her shoulders and upper body tense up as she begins to touch herself, but her movements are beyond the frame. As she brings herself to climax over the course of the next three minutes, we watch her move back and forth, open and close her eyes, make soft moaning sounds, and peer into the camera lens occasionally. Her orgasm is brief and the only evidence of it is in her face: she contracts, furrows her brows, and… Keep reading

For this piece, Will Goldbloom, a theatre historian, and Zack Russell, a theatre artist, read Donna-Michelle St. Bernard’s Gas Girls, published in 2011 by Playwrights Canada Press. They wrote up their thoughts separately, then the TRB recorded their first conversation about the play. Listen to their discussion: [Audio clip: view full post to listen] WILL: “Love for gas, gas for cash, cash for living, living for love.” This circular refrain, repeated throughout Donna-Michelle St. Bernard’s Gas Girls, summarizes the trajectories of the play’s characters and emulates the monotony of the story. In the borderlands of Zimbabwe, two teenage girls, Gigi and Lola, solicit highway truck drivers for sex in exchange for gas, which their broker and pimp Chickn converts to… Keep reading

That grocery store he went to for a can-a-corn and maybe bread flashed right into a blessed cotillion and mister m turned to a produce boy just about fifteen years surprised (talking like a distant cousin) turned and said “excuse my frankness, but I have been removed.” Dropping that can from three of his weary fingers the flat crack drop on the floor scared the boy just for a moment mister saw what he heard the pushed cantaloupe, the fixed coconut aisles just stinging with tall puffed out shoulders and mister looked lost to the boy and that boy looked lost to mister until he bent down on his knee respectfully picked up his can, shook the boys unsound palm… Keep reading