Category: Books
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Standout Reads 2016
Late again… But you were probably needing some books to read this summer. In case you’re bored, here’s the best of what I read last year: Fiction The Sport of Kings, CE Morgan. Ha. After the exquisite gem of Morgan’s first novel, what did her readers expect? It’s always difficult to come out with the…
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Advice from a Master
Some years ago I took a master class with the poet Marvin Bell. I’d been galvanized by an interview I read in American Poetry Review. The interview (not linked) was accompanied by a selection of Bell’s Resurrected Dead Man poems. I was only starting to take myself seriously as a poet—i.e., to give myself permission…
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Standout Reads of 2011
Once again these are the books that stood out for me among those I read this past year. They were not necessarily published in 2011; many of them appeared decades ago, in fact. Fiction Native, by William Haywood Henderson. Henderson’s gorgeous, delicate, but also ripping first novel explores some themes similar to those in…
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Broken
Walking nurtures an open mind… The sky is like an upturned plate—a big platter of openness filled with thoughts.” –Liz Caile, A Life at Treeline In Deep Survival, Laurence Gonzales writes that people who are lost in the wilderness and survive often have in common that they prayed. Those who are found but only…
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Standout Reads of 2010
Not necessarily written this year, just the ones that popped for me of those I read. Fiction: Every Man Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada (a German couple find a way to resist the Nazis) The Informers, by Juan Gabriel Vasquez (the legacy of Nazi Germany tears apart a modern-day Bogota family) Life and Fate, by…
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PTSD—What It’s Like
Ever had stage fright? I don’t mean the good kind. Where you have some butterflies in your stomach and a bit of a metallic taste in your mouth. Maybe that’s slightly unpleasant but it can also help you focus a little better and in the end it seems to come out all right. The audience…
Claudia Putnam: Writer: Poetry & Prose 