Glögg and Carols at Simon’s Tavern
They come every year around this time, gathering at the long bar or huddling around the worn wooden tables. Many stand in the middle of the floor shoulder to shoulder […]
Interview: Ruben Quesada on His New Collection, Brutal Companion
Ruben Quesada is a poet and editor of the award-winning anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry. His poetry and criticism have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Best American Poetry, The Believer, Harvard […]
Interview: Daniel Borzutzky and The Murmuring Grief of the Americas
Conducted by Binx Perino I learned of Daniel Borzutzky’s work after reading Lake Michigan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). I had just moved to Chicago and was interested in the […]
Chicago Is Lit: Printers Row Lit Fest and More September Events
Avid book lovers can be a solitary bunch—after all, it’s hard to lug our stacks (and stacks) of books around a party. But that is exactly what’s about to go […]
Chicago Is Lit: August Live Literature Events and Readings
This month’s column explores another reason Chicago’s literary scene is “lit”: the wide variety of live literature events held in neighborhoods across the city. From conversations with award-winning authors to […]
Interview: S. Fey, Author of Decompose
Interview by Binx Perino. In preparation for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs 2024 Annual Conference, I organized a poetry reading to benefit Kansas City based mutual aid groups […]
Review: The Terror of Love and Grief—Elsewhere: An Elegy, by Faisal Mohyuddin
In his poem “The Hourglass. The Pebble. The Throne of God,” Faisal Mohyuddin ponders “the lightless language of elegy.” His father is dead, and he is grieving. And he wonders if he […]
Review: Watching the Writer’s Mind Work, Write Cut Rewrite: The Cutting Room Floor of Modern Literature, by Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon
Everyone, I suppose, has a sense of the what-if of history. What if Abraham Lincoln hadn’t gone to Ford’s Theater that night and avoided assassination? What if I had taken a […]
Talk of the Town: An Eclipse Poem
Everyone looked up On Michigan AvenueOn balconies and rooftopsBy the AdlerWe all looked up. We all felt giddyGrateful even for this momentPeople waved their solar glasses at each otherAs if we […]
Interview: Poet Hannah V. Warren on Apocalypse and Digging Up the Past
In the humid loam of a Jurassic-era feeling Southern United States, poet Hannah V. Warrendebuts her collection, Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales (Sundress Publications, January2024). Betraying the old adage, you […]
Interview: Diego Báez Debuts New Poetry Collection, Yaguarete White
Interview conducted by Binx River Perino. Chicago-based writer Diego Báez is an educator at the City Colleges and a fellow at CantoMundo, the Surge Institute, and the Poetry Foundation’s Incubator […]
Review: Mother Goose for English Majors, The Lamb Cycle: What the Great English Poets Would Have Written about Mary and Her Lamb, by David R. Ewbank, with illustrations by Kate Feiffer
If Shakespeare, instead of Mother Goose, had written “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” perhaps he would have penned a sonnet to take the young girl to task for abandoning “Thy […]