Review: Making Friends With a Poet, The Poet’s House, by Jean Thompson
Carla Sawyer is a tall, smart-alecky 21-year-old who’s working for a landscaping company until she figures out what to do with her life. She’s on a job in one of […]
Review: The Seed-Germ King: Louis Sullivan’s Idea, by Tim Samuelson and Chris Ware
Louis Sullivan’s Idea, a biography of the 19th century Chicago architect, by Chicago’s first cultural historian Timothy Samuelson, is, in the most literal sense of the word, a beautiful book. […]
Review: All Those People, All Those Lives, Where Are They Now?, Graceland Cemetery, by Adam Selzer
Chicago is young. Compared with the large cities of Africa, Asia, and Europe—hell, compared with the Native American metropolis that occupied the Cahokia Mounds—Chicago is a mere toddler of 189 […]
Review: Wildly Contorted and Reimagined: Don’t Make Me Do Something We’ll Both Regret, by Tim Jones-Yelvington
In his story collection Don’t Make Me Do Something We’ll Both Regret, Chicagoan Tim Jones-Yelvington zestfully recasts gay men and boys in the central roles of a surprisingly wide array […]
Essay: How Many Books Can $30 Buy at the Newberry Book Fair?
When I visited the Newberry Library Book Fair on Friday, I knew I had to come up with a strategy. It’s a locally famous sale, featuring tens of thousands of […]
Review: Poetry Jagged and Anguished, A Boy in the City, by S. Yarberry
The pain that S. Yarberry suffers as a transgender person is strikingly described in their new book of jagged, anguished poetry A Boy in the City. It is pain set […]
Poem for Today: Freedom
It happened in Ferris Bueller’s hometown In the Mayberry of the Midwest I first heard about it while listening to WXRT When Terri Hemmert played “All You Need Is Love” […]
Dialogs: Haymarket Books Launches Maya Marshall’s All the Blood Involved in Love
Haymarket Books describes itself as a radical and independent publisher, and in light of current events, I am grateful that they are still in the game. They have a new […]
Review: Talkin’ about Early Bob Dylan, The Dylan Tapes
Bob Dylan is having a bit of a late-career cultural moment. His most recent album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, was released in June 2019, and the featured single, “Murder Most […]
Review: Myriad Chicagos, Wherever I’m At: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry, edited by Donald G. Evans and Robin Metz
Summer mornings, in my West Side childhood, I would go out on our rickety second-story back porch, and, across the alley, on the worn, gray asphalt of the parking lot/school […]
Review: Flight of the Rondone: High School Dropout vs. Big Pharma: The Fight to Save My Son’s Life, by Patrick Girondi
Flight of the Rondone: High School Dropout vs. Big Pharma: The Fight To Save My Son’s Life (the memoir so meandering they named it thrice), by Patrick Girondi, poses several […]
Poem: A Note to the World From the Children of Ukraine
A poem by guest author Josephine Chaparro. WhispersWhispersWhispers We heardWe heardWe heard WhispersWhispersWhispers Soon the whispers turned into soundsThe sounds turned into soldiersThe soldiers turned into guns, military tanks, and […]