Solace in a Book

One of my least favorite things about summer

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Do you have tinnitus? Well, I do. Maybe that's why these buggers bug me so. We get the 17-year cicadas in droves around here, and in off years, like this summer, we still get enough to be annoying. Here's hoping the noises in your head are more pleasant. Cicada song drills into my skull, the noise unwinds a hot thread-- along these nerves. Harsh, grating jackhammer drone never fades. Like trepanation it’s pressure incessant that bores into my brain to … [Read more...]

Do you know how you look?

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The other day in the paper I saw a photograph of a politician, an older man. It wasn’t a posed picture; it looked like he didn’t know he was being captured on film.  The snapshot was anything but flattering. Every facial feature pointed downward. His eyes were cast downward. But more than that, his wrinkles and creases seemed to be weighed down, sagging, and his chin, in a giant flattened pout, had rutted into a circle of wrinkled flesh. The picture was so bad that I felt … [Read more...]

Ed Paschke Art Center

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Last week I visited the Ed Paschke Art Center in Chicago’s Jefferson Park neighborhood (5415 W. Higgins). The storefront museum is open seven days a week from ten a.m. to seven p.m. It’s free. For those who do not know about Chicago artist Ed Paschke, he was a contemporary (1939-2004) artist who lived in Jefferson Park and taught at Northwestern University. Here’s the Wikipedia link. You may want to take time and see all his art on digital display. The art center has a … [Read more...]

News, call for submissions, and what’s “just?”

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Jan Bottiglieri has a book of poems out—it is called Alloy and it is from Mayapple Press. Here's how Mayapple describes Jan's book: "A butterfly casts the shadow of a man; a homesick mermaid cleans teeth; a young girl pushes a heavy iron, singing. In Alloy, these and others (daughter, mother, astronaut; an occasional zombie or alien) find voice through poems exploring memory in all its shifting sense and purpose: from childhood recollection to adult reckoning, from folklore … [Read more...]