By Dania Alkhouli
FROM: Moon Tide Press Blog
Believing in fate is a foundational part of my life, so when I was perusing my list of books to indulge in next, something called me to John Brantingham’s The Green of Sunset. For starters, I think it was the title. I hear sunsets get called everything but green, and this had me seeking out the elements of a sunset often unseen, like reading between the rays of a departing sun, and that’s something I needed this week.
by James Benton
FROM: Los Angeles Review
Like a hurricane of images, or a tsunami of grief, Sweeny’s lines strain against a background of stability and coherence that barely holds together. The book is an elegy not only because the title tells us so, but because it performs its elegiac ritual without the filter of conventional form or syntactical coherence. If grief is inchoate, the poet asks, what language is sufficient to the duty it is called upon to perform? The answer is a language suddenly released from its duties to inform or to persuade—functions of containment, framing, and interpretation—a non-syntax left to its singular capacity to conjure the ineffable, to bring it into being.
Continue reading “REVIEW: LITTLE MILLION DOORS: AN ELEGY BY CHAD SWEENEY”
By Alexandra Umlas
FROM: Cultural Weekly
Arminé Iknadossian’s mother would gather olives from the trees that grew just outside of her daughter’s high school; she couldn’t imagine all of that wonderful fruit going to waste. Iknadossian has not written a poem for this image she remembers all of these years later, but perhaps all of the poems in her first collection of poetry are, in a way, an homage to her mother’s incessant olive gathering.
Continue reading “Book Review: All That Wasted Fruit by Arminé Iknadossian”
By Brian Dunlap
FROM: Arkay Artists
Arkay Artists will be publishing Salvadorian L.A. poet Ingrid M. Calderon-Collins’ memoir in the Winter of 2019. Let the Buzzards Eat Me Whole is a memoir summoned in poetic prose and poems.
By Emily Perez
FROM: The Rumpus
I had the privilege of spending a few days with Sara Borjas at the CantoMundo retreat in the summer of 2016. She is electric—smart, funny, sassy, vulnerable—and these qualities come through immediately in her debut collection, Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff. The title indicates the heart will be fully exposed—a “window” that can be seen and seen through—but the mouth is another story. The image of the “cliff” suggests that the speaker’s words will present obstacles and launching points, precarious ledges and walls to slam against.
Continue reading “A CLEANSING TORNADO: HEART LIKE A WINDOW, MOUTH LIKE A CLIFF BY SARA BORJAS”
By Arlene Mateo
FROM: pspoets
Sideshow Bookstore has a lot to offer, little nooks and shelves of great reads and highly recommended staff picks, it’s the place you find instant comfort in. Tony, the owner, has undeniably created a meaningful respite for all Angelenos.
by ASTRID
FROM: LA Taco
Mangoes fill Yesika Salgado’s poetry in the same way Jacaranda trees blossom throughout her hometown in Silver Lake. She is a poet and activist emerging as the Sentimental Boss Bitch many have come to know and adore for gaslighting toxic masculinity on Instagram with heartfelt poems and screenshots.
Continue reading “Fall In Love With Yesika Salgado: Silver Lake’s Fat, Fly, Salvadoran Poet”
By Brian Dunlap
The Pomona Valley Review (PVR) is now open for submissions for its 13th issue. Submitters will be contacted in July with decisions. PVR 13 is scheduled for an early August publication.
Continue reading “Pomona Valley Review Call For Submissions”
Mike Sonsken has been a fixture in the Los Angeles Literary community for two decades. He burst on the scene spitting spoken word verse late into the night, at many venues, events, and open mics, some that no longer exist. During the course of these two decades he’s traveled to Echo Park and Sylmar, Venice and the Eastside, Downtown and Torrance, and everywhere in-between, performing poems laced with the city’s stories and history, hosting open mics and readings, being a tour guide to its streets, teaching students poetry and encouraging them to explore who and what Los Ángeles is.
by Astrid
From: L.A. Taco
Matt Sedillo is a Chicano poet, writer, creative director, and public intellectual called “the poet laureate of the struggle” by Dr. Paul Ortiz and “the best political poet in America” by investigative journalist Greg Palast. He has been featured in over 80 colleges and universities and various media outlets including All Def Digital, Los Angeles Times, and C-SPAN.
Los Angeles Literature 