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Dystopia Borne Alive in No Land in Sight

March 5, 2023 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Jason Tandon

No Land in Sight
by Charles Simic
Knopf, 96pp., $23.95

HR

Charles Simic is not just one of the most celebrated and honored poets of the last fifty years; now in his eighties, he remains one of the most prolific, having released four books since 2015. Fans of Simic’s poetry who have especially enjoyed his newer work, such as Come Closer and Listen (2019) and Scribbled in the Dark (2017), will find many of the hallmarks of his recent style in his latest collection, No Land in Sight. The poems are brief, often ten lines or fewer, and they are primarily set in a city (presumably New York City, where Simic has spent much of his time when not in New Hampshire). His persona is a solitary figure who suffers from insomnia and roams the streets at all hours or lies in bed listening to the wind, a portentous sound in Simic’s work. He routinely shows empathy for the homeless, disdain for political leaders, and bemusement at the masses who blindly follow them. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The Line, The New Word

On Wing With Word Through Anselm Kiefer’s Exodus

December 1, 2022 By Rachel Reid Wilkie Leave a Comment

Gagosian at Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles (through 25 March 2023)
by Rachel Reid Wilkie

Los Angeles poet Rachel Reid Wilkie was given the task of walking into Anselm Kiefer’s Exodus — a literally monumental exhibition, in that each of these paintings are upwards of 30’ tall — and addressing the colossal artworks “cold,” as in spontaneously on the spot. Below is her 7-part response, with each video speaking to one painting as Wilkie circles through the cavernous, faintly-lit room: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Short Film, The Line, The New Word, Video

Words To Wrap Around A Dying Brother

November 5, 2022 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Smoking the Bible
Reviewed by Rhony Bhopla

Smoking the Bible
by Chris Abani
Copper Canyon Press, 96pp., $15.99

HR

Chris Abani’s autobiographical book of poems, Smoking the Bible, centers on the relationship of two brothers growing up in Nigeria with an Igbo father and an English mother. The poems, which incorporate the Igbo language along with references to West African rituals, reveals the devotion of a sibling who has become his brother’s keeper as he succumbs to cancer. Displacement, violence at home, civil unrest, and neocolonial forms of subjugation are all running themes in this accomplished, elegiac collection. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The Line, The New Word

Songs For Our Higher Selves

July 30, 2022 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

A Cadence for Redemption: Conversations With Abraham Lincoln
by Eve Wood
Del Sol Press, 46pp., $5.99

Employing the fictive voice of a former president, Eve Wood shifts the perspective on the happenings of our times – where all indicators point to the slow, inexorable collapse of the American Experiment – to the one man who represents the very heart of our onetime democracy and the towering soul of this once-revered nation: Abraham Lincoln. A Cadence for Redemption is a work of narrative brilliance, the arc and architecture of which is seemingly upheld by the merest of lyrical tentpoles – that, in all their brevity, of the poems themselves. Yet the ideas across the collection, and the emotive carry in each one of these songs of love, songs of longing and loss, are as equally affecting as they are disquieting; they are as well, in their grand sum, entirely profound.

If you’re seeking to recalibrate your own internal compass on what it means to be a ‘good person’ or, conversely, are in search of sound template for our next generation of elected leaders, A Cadence for Redemption is a singular point of onset, for its terrains are of the highest bearings, its lyricism of heartsome beauty, its imagination of distinct wonder. It is, in other words, an altogether fine book of poetry for this fraught moment of our now.  – C von Hassett

Below are three excerpts from A Cadence for Redemption, courtesy of  Eve Wood.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, Fiction, The Line, The New Word

“Skunk Hour,” by Robert Lowell: A Reflection

March 22, 2022 By James McWilliams 1 Comment

by James McWilliams

Robert Lowell
Life Studies / From the Union Dead
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 176pp

In 1958, The Partisan Review published Robert Lowell’s poem “Skunk Hour.” This was a notable moment in American literary history. The poem was closely linked to Lowell’s friendship with Elizabeth Bishop. Reading and re-reading Bishop’s work allowed Lowell to escape, as he put it, “the shell of my old manner.” It is to her that he dedicates this poem. 

“Skunk Hour” is worthy of close study because it captures Robert Lowell in the midst of creative transformation. He alters himself from a formal to a confessional poet in the middle of the poem. It happens “right before our eyes,” as one critic aptly put it.

What follows is my own stanza-by-stanza attempt to make sense of it. I’ve always loved this poem for the way it hits my ear, and the shifting imagery. But I’ve never really slowed down and tried to figure out why. This is what I’m doing here. My comments are italicized    —jm———

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Fiction, The Line, The New Word, Thought, Video

The Boundary Stone

February 21, 2022 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

The Boundary Stone
by C von Hassett

PURCHASE
.

Nothing of you but breakage,
scattered bone, a length of which
I lift.

Black, charred, one with all else, 

its drippings run with light,
its marrows the fats of luminous night…
.

And so begins The Boundary Stone.

The Boundary Stone, by C von Hassett (Front cover)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The New Word

New Poems from John Biscello

January 12, 2021 By John Biscello Leave a Comment

Excerpted from Moonglow on Mercy Street
forthcoming on CSF Publishing

Birthing Pains

To see, everywhere,
brave little lights going up,
flares of hope and justice,
holding hands
to tip the scales
in a bond of solidarity,
a fire-chastened purge
and desire for change’s
holy golden grail,
the quest,
a blessed rhyme
and legacy,
with each and every
one of our hearts
breaking open
to scale the ribs of light
and become radical midwives
to a collective rebirth.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: The New Word

To Inter Your Name in Earth: a Review of Kevin Young’s Brown

July 9, 2020 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Kevin T. O’Connor

Brown: Poems
by Kevin Young

Knopf, 176pp., $19.29
Harvard Review

In The Book of Hours, his 2011 collection, Kevin Young moved from elegiac responses to the sudden death of his father to reanimating poems on the birth of his son. His new collection, Brown, reverses the trajectory, beginning with “Home Recordings,” shadowed recollections of boyhood, and culminating with “Field Recordings,” somber reflections on the recurring traumas of African American social history. In its progression toward a more experienced vision, this brilliant and moving collection is structured as a coming-of-age chronicle. Young’s poetry on social issues tempers a tragic sense of outrage with a blues-based ethos which, as Young points out in a recent review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power, is “embodied by the likes of the poet Lucille Clifton or Zora Neale Hurston … [and] sees black life as a secret pleasure, or at least sees joy, however hard-earned, as ‘an act of resistance.’” In these poems, the expression of “hard-earned joy” in the face of unspeakable injustice is an ennobling challenge. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The Line, The New Word

Bloom how you must, wild: a Review of Dispatch, by Cameron Awkward-Rich

July 6, 2020 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Flora Field

Dispatch
by Cameron Awkward-Rich
Persea, 80pp., $12.69
Columbia Journal

In poetry, a body becomes not just a vehicle through which we move about the world, but the lens from which we write that experience. What does it then mean to comment on the world from a body that exists at the intersection of so many systems of violence? How does that violence surround and move through the body? What does one do to try and move away from it, while not moving away from their communities? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The Line, The New Word

The Lynching

June 30, 2020 By Riot Material 1 Comment

by Thylias Moss

They should have slept, would have
but had to fight the darkness, had

to build a fire and bathe a man in
flames. No

other soap’s as good when
the dirt is the skin. Black since
birth, burnt by birth. His father
is not in heaven. No parent

[Read more…]

Filed Under: The New Word

Banishment

May 27, 2020 By Riot Material 4 Comments

for Sharon Doubiago

She urinates on the graves
of her precursors—
it’s her thing (one of many),
to “unite my living waters
with theirs.” The list
includes Camus,
Karl Marx, George Eliot,
over a hundred in all.
She once called me a fascist. [Read more…]

Filed Under: The New Word

The Silence and Other Poems

April 23, 2020 By John Biscello Leave a Comment

by John Biscello

The Silence

My friend
who lives in the woods
told me there’s
a silence there
he’s never heard before.
Said
he’s lived in the woods
for nearly twenty years
and while he’s heard
plenty of quiet,
volumes and volumes
of quiet,
the silence
that he’s now hearing
is something new,
[Read more…]

Filed Under: The New Word

The Slave Trade

February 24, 2020 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

by Iman Mersal 
translated from the Arabic by Robyn Creswell
.
            I went down the narrow passage, wide enough for one slave at a time, to the harbor.
            An Englishman inspects the line of those leaving the fort—maybe he has unloaded his cargo of missionaries and guns and now waits for a ship to carry him over the ocean to the cane fields. A handsome man, in fact. Why is he smiling at me?
            Piles of gold beneath the palms, piles of salt under the sun.
            When will a sailor come unfasten the iron ball from my feet? I want to make sure the pencil and Moleskin notebook are still in my backpack, since I plan to turn whatever happens to me into heart-wrenching prose.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: The New Word

“1941,” When Everything Seemed Like Something Else

February 7, 2020 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

“1941”
by Fanny Howe

On a cold day near Lake Erie
I was in a double bind.
The snow was like a lamb
Shorn in the upper circle.

Someone pushed me over the ice and stones.
Someone else chattered behind.
A rubber nipple was pressed to my lips.
Gagged and spat until my tears were milk.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: The New Word

Cathexis

December 6, 2019 By Riot Material 1 Comment

When we say the world is haunted
we mean untranslated

as yet.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: The New Word

Who Holds The Stag’s Head Gets to Speak

March 4, 2019 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Dear God who lives inside the stag’s head
even after the stag’s shot and lies slumped and abashed
on the forest floor. Protect him.

Even after he’s been heaved onto the car’s dark roof.
Forest Green. Or Pacific Blue. Nowhere he can see.
His body stiffens like a trellis above the driver.
Help him. Hold him in your sight.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: The New Word

Where to Begin?

January 31, 2019 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

by Jacques J. Rancourt

First, we’re skinny-dipping,
Sam & I, in a pond in Tennessee,

which is his idea, I should say,
& the tree with the rope swing
looms darker

than the dark night sky.

Second, the harvest moon,
which we came here to see,

is nowhere to be found,
instead the sky burning with stars
I can’t see without my glasses [Read more…]

Filed Under: The New Word

Penal Cistern Lightning Throne Lightning Rebounded

January 17, 2019 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Back into the body all the lightning goes
back into the body. Up through the crown
of the skull and round again like the Whip-It
at the fairgrounds. Pushing the boundaries
of the light body. Overloading the light
body. Silly bowl shaking above the bowl
of the skull, which is a bowl holding court over
bowl the brain. Bowl into bowl into bowl.
All the curves pressing together. Too much
light in the light body. Body of cattle after long [Read more…]

Filed Under: The New Word

Pain Scale

January 17, 2019 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

by Catherine Barnett

Floating above the gynecologist’s hands,
Dolor looks down at me
with her many expressions.

Someone sketched the eyes, the mouths,
someone pinned them up,
arranged the faces

so they softly say, like this? like this?
The doctor says to choose one,
but I’m no fool, I close my eyes [Read more…]

Filed Under: The New Word

I Listen

January 6, 2019 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

by John Biscello
From his forthcoming collection of poems, Arclight, publishing this February by Indie Blu(e) Publishing
.......................................
Dawn. The sea breeze,
salt-fringed, rolls in through
the opened glass doors,
its damp fingers sifting
and touching upon
the cravings,
rent and folds
of our shared bare skin,
It’s like home, you say,
and this makes me dig my nails
in deeper, [Read more...]

Filed Under: The New Word

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Riot Sounds

Sleaford Mods, "Force 10 From Navarone," featuring Florence Shaw, can be listened to at Riot Material magazine -- in the exclusive Riot Sounds.

New From the Mods: “Force 10 From Navarone”

Sleaford Mods
feat. Florence Shaw (of Dry Cleaning)
from UK Grim

on Rough Trade

Dean Blunt's "The Rot." Listen at Riot Material under the exclusive Riot Sounds.

“The Rot” — Though A Rose By Any Other Name

by Dean Blunt
feat. Joanne Robertson
from BLACK METAL 2

https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/10-the-rot.m4a

on Rough Trade

The Line

A poetic interpretation of Anselm Kiefer's Exodus, at Los Angeles Marciano Art Foundation, is at Riot Material.

On Wing With Word Through Anselm Kiefer’s Exodus

Gagosian at Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles (through 25 March 2023) by Rachel Reid Wilkie Los Angeles poet Rachel Reid Wilkie was given the task of walking into Anselm Kiefer’s Exodus — a literally monumental exhibition, in that each of these paintings are upwards of 30’ tall — and addressing the colossal artworks “cold,” as in […]

Songbook of a Bygone Dead: Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song

Reviewed by Dan Chiasson The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan Simon & Schuster, 352pp., $28.93 NYR Bob Dylan’s new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, is a kind of music-appreciation course open to auditors and members of the general public. It is best savored one chapter, one song, at a time, while listening to the […]

Grant Wallace, “Through Evolution Comes Revelation.” at Riot Material magazine.

Communication Breakdown: Grant Wallace, His Heirs & the Legacy of a Forgotten Genius

Grant Wallace: Over the Psychic Radio at Ricco/Maresca Gallery, NYC (through 3 December 2022) By Michael Bonesteel Freelance writer and editor Deborah Coffin of Albany, California, was in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley in 1997 when she first encountered street musician Brian Wallace at a party. “I had a friend who knew Brian,” […]

Smoking the Bible by Chris Abani

Words To Wrap Around A Dying Brother

Smoking the Bible Reviewed by Rhony Bhopla Smoking the Bible by Chris Abani Copper Canyon Press, 96pp., $15.99 HR Chris Abani’s autobiographical book of poems, Smoking the Bible, centers on the relationship of two brothers growing up in Nigeria with an Igbo father and an English mother. The poems, which incorporate the Igbo language along […]

Yehonatan Koenig. "Shulamith" (2022). At Riot Material Magazine

Yehonatan Koenig’s Subversion of the Ordinary

Knowing Not Knowing, at Matt Drey Arts (presenting with the Kava Collective) by Mat Gleason The art of Yehonatan Koenig is a subatomic soiree, every mark-making molecule involved in contributing to a higher purpose along the way. There is form and structure revealed here, an elegant point in the digressions of a thousand or more […]

The Joshua Tree Talk

A Conversation on Dzogchen C von Hassett & Rachel Reid Wilkie at Joshua Tree Retreat Center 

Louise Bourgeois: What Is The Shape of This Problem?

at University of Southern California, Fisher Museum of Art. (through 3 December 3, 2022) Reviewed by Margaret Lazzari Louise Bourgeois is widely recognized for her sculptures and installations, but Louise Bourgeois: What is The Shape of This Problem is a wonderful opportunity to immerse yourself in her perhaps-lesser-known prints, fabric work and writings. This exhibit contains over […]

The Artful Construction of The ‘I’

by Merve Emre NYR The essay form…bears some responsibility for the fact that bad essays tell stories about people instead of elucidating the matter at hand. —Theodor Adorno The personal essay is a genre that is difficult to define but easy to denounce. The offending element is rarely the essay as a form, but its […]

Moonage Daydream Conveys More Myth Than Man

Moonage Daydream Dir. Brett Morgan Reviewed by Nicholas Goldwin As one of the greatest shapeshifters in the expansive history of rock music, it seems only fitting that the documentary with David Bowie as its subject never seems content to express the trials, tribulations and artistic triumphs of Bowie in any one fixed way. This is […]

Carnación di Rocío Molina, at Riot Material Magazine.

On Binding: Notes from Venice

Bienalle Arte and Bienalle Danza, Venice 2022 By Allyn Aglaïa Chest bound, lips sealed, I walked through Venice alone, quiet, and: thought about narratives that bind us to erotic binds

Mohammad Barrangi's Guardians of Eden (Dreamscape #8), at Riot Material magazine.

Transcendence Beyond Erasure in Mohammad Barrangi’s Dreamscape

at Advocartsy, Los Angeles (thru 5 November 2022) Reviewed by Christopher Ian Lutz Fantasy requires a symbolic vehicle to transport a character from the real world into the imaginary realm, where the laws of reality are subverted or obscured to justify an otherwise absurd event. The artist might depict the vehicle as a real object […]

Idris Khan's The Pattern of Landscape at Sean Kelly Gallery, Los Angeles. An interview with Idris is at Riot Material magazine.

An Interview with Idris Khan

The Pattern of Landscape, at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles (through 5 November 2022) by Ricky Amadour Opening on the corner of Highland and De Longpre Avenues in the heart of Hollywood, Idris Khan’s The Pattern of Landscape is the inaugural exhibition at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles. Khan investigates color theory, text, and musical concepts through […]

Soul Crash: Our Slow, Inexorable Release Into the Metaverse

by Sue Halpern The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball Liveright 352pp., $18.89 NYR In October 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would now be called Meta and its business interests would be pivoting to the metaverse, there was almost universal confusion: most observers had no idea what he was […]

green tara

Pointing the Staff at the Old Man

A wisdom transmission by Samaneri Jayasāra Excerpted from —  Advice from the Lotus Born  from the chapter “Pointing the Staff at the Old Man” Translated by Eric Pema Kunsang Rangjung Yeshe Publications, 184pp., $21.95 . .

Margaret Lazzari’s "Shimmer." From the exhibition "Breathing Space."

Margaret Lazzari’s Luminous Breathing Space

at George Billis Gallery, Los Angeles (through 8 October 2022) Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner “Things are not what they seem: nor are they otherwise.” –Buddha Margaret Lazzari’s luminous solo exhibition of paintings, entitled Breathing Space, were painted during the pandemic, and the exhibition title is indeed significant. It’s defined as a respite, a hiatus, or an […]

A Look Back on an Iconoclast: Art Critic Dave Hickey

by Jarrett Earnest Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art by Daniel Oppenheimer University of Texas Press, 141 pp., $24.95 The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded by Dave Hickey University of Chicago Press, 123 pp., $15.00 (paper) Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by Dave Hickey Art Issues Press, 215 […]

From Phil Tippet's Mad God, reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

Nihilism Births Its Own Interminable Hell

Mad God Dir. Phil Tippett Reviewed by Nicholas Goldwin Technically astonishing and immersive to a fault, director Phil Tippett successfully demonstrates that thirty years of relentless dedication to your craft can lead to cinematic innovations even his old stomping grounds – the sets of Star Wars and Jurassic Park – have yet to catch up. […]

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art. word. thought.