notanotherbookreview

There's been a fashion of  professional theater performed in apartments but until this HAMLET, I hadn't experienced this. A real surprise  how unexpectedly alive and vital this production was in an intimate chair-filled livingroom where actors and spectators were on the same level. This wasn't experimental as much as a classic restored to the bones of what's essentially a family play--dysfunctional to be sure but a moving discovery in this audacious show. The lead (Melissa Nelson) is a young woman, who looked like a Danish boy yet within minutes commanded with a rational self-possession that trumped her torment. Despite the many cries of "Madness!" and her circumlocutions of language, you question that charge. Relentless as any prosecutor, Hamlet investigates her stepfather and mother, accused by her father's ghost. Though you know the stages of her investigation, the process and outcome, this performance, rational and impassioned, is riveting. A...

Jex Blackwell Saves the World (Pelekinesis, May) by P. William Grimm was both refreshing and a complete surprise. Grimm an American writer and fillmaker, has written novels and short story collections-- The Seventh and Counselor, Valencia Street and Sick Sense of Hubris. He 's published in lit blogs, like Eclectica Magazine and HTML Giant . His influences are Kurt Vonnegut, Joan Didion, Charles Bukowski, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett. So he likes the truth, outrageous or otherwise, and a mystery with soul and style. Grimm's final inspiration is  Encyclopedia Brown, a series of kid's books about a boy genius. Grimm thinks of Jex Blackwell as a "Dadaesque homage" to that series. So this is kind of an adult YA mystery, written like an underground graphic novel with a heroine (not unlike orphaned Anne of Green Gables or headstrong Jo in Little Women ). Jex is aware of her potential and completely invents herself at aged 16. She wants to do good in the ...

I don't read a lot of poetry but every time I read Katrinka Moore's work, I am not reading words on paper, I am seeing images; fleeting, miniscule, delicate, vanishing. A former dancer and choreographer, before turning to poetry, Moore's poems are constructed with subtle nuances and sudden gestures, wild movements and still forms that mirror the natural world. Her book  Numia about a wild girl in forestlands had the shock of discovery as we, like Numia, are part of nature's beauty, terror, joy in a place that hasn't a human touch. In Wayfarers (Pelekinesis, April)  nomads pass through barely habitated terrain--where their purpose leads. Some seek escape, others look for a place to stay the night or just pass through. Regardless, they find beauty, danger, the eternal, or what defies human understandings. These poems are about the terrain or traces of humans among other mysteries. Evocative illustrations with text. The book is divided into three sections: I  ...