gerald locklin | the vampires saved civilization: new and selected prose, 2000-2010

Click the cover if you are interested in buying this book… A collection of the Long Beach legend’s prose–fiction and non-fiction–from 2000 to 2010, with works dealing with 1960s Los Angeles, the legacy of Charles Bukowski, the simple pleasures of Continue reading gerald locklin | the vampires saved civilization: new and selected prose, 2000-2010

jared smith | looking into the machinery

Over the course of a long and notable career, Jared Smith has made his poetic sense surer and has developed his technique to the level of mastery. Looking Into The Machinery demonstrates how his poetic vision, always expansive, has been Continue reading jared smith | looking into the machinery

todd moore | saturday night desperate, don winter, and the black mitten of poetry

I remember getting hit once with a baseball bat right in the middle of the back and the force of that blow spun me around toward a girl who was laughing. Sometimes a book will have that same effect on Continue reading todd moore | saturday night desperate, don winter, and the black mitten of poetry

fred voss | goodstone

I remember telling Fred about how I almost beat the shit out’ve some dude at my post office job and Fred wrote back suggesting I try to keep my cool. How Fred managed to keep his composure long enough at Goodstone to write this masterpiece I’ll never know. Such incompetence, immaturity, idleness, lifelessness, idiocity, on-th-job drunkeness & insanity as can be witnessed in a Breughal painting. This book is about the end of the Industrial Revolution as personified by the day-to-day workings of a bomber aircraft factory–it certainly documents the coming end of the United States’ long-held boast as #1 industrial nation of the world. One wonders if morale picked up at Goodstone during the “crisis” in the Persian Gulf–did this insane asylum begin to sing & dance for the rich boy’s money & oil war? This book is a knife stuck in the guts, and twisted. And somehow Fred has done it all without getting caught up in the mire of hatred & spite that most of his fellow workmates have lost themselves in. Our dear Whitman would bawl his eyes out if he read this book and found out what has happened to his beloved workers of America (though I imagine every late-20th century factory in the world is like this, except maybe Japan’s). Continue reading fred voss | goodstone