Bolano’s works are a wash of multiplicities. Art and literature are woven into crime and atrocity; literary culture is a whore to its own vainity; vanity is a strung out pimp in the middle of a thunderstorm; the story of person a: poet, custodian, radical transvestite briefly intersects with and is
Charles Baudelaire's grave lies in Montparnasse Cemetery, smack in the middle of Paris' sixth arrondissement. The winter months are a sheet of gray, with an endless roof of clouds hanging close overhead. Built high, the walls of the cemetery are speckled with moss; the rain splatters across the crack
The middle years of John Milton's career were devoted to prose. Caught up in the Puritan movement and the English Civil War, he penned political pamphlets and idealistic treatises on religious freedom and the glory of the new Commonwealth. True, a peculiarly personal sensibility revealed itself in th
John Ashbery has influenced more poets than almost any other author since 1950. Dean Young, Jane Miller, David Shapiro, and many younger poets take up the pen from within his tradition of shifting tone, quirky imagery, and timeless narratives. His innovations seem to have arrived simultaneously with