Guest Post on NOWW Blog
Here’s something I haven’t done for a while: a guest blog post! In it, I discuss a deeper, technical aspect of writing poetry that can help bring the music out.
Meditations
by Marcus Aurelius Not long ago, I was reading Aldous Huxley’s The Doors to Perception with the full intention of reviewing it, but I was struggling to come up with anything meaningful for discussion. I found the book to be extraordinary in many ways, even important enough to help me through some difficult times, but…
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Bina
by Anakana Schofield Bina––pronounced Bye-na, not Bee-na––is the latest non-traditional story by Giller nominated Schofield. Told as a series of warnings scribbled on the backs of old envelopes and receipts, the titular septuagenarian bluntly describes her dangerous encounters with men. Because Bina’s convinced that he’s largely to blame for ruining her life and turning her…
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The Essential Rumi
translated by Coleman Barks Jelaluddin Rumi was a sufi mystic who lived in Persia and Anatolia in the thirteenth century. I’ve read not only that his works have been hugely influential on Middle Eastern literature, but also that translations of these poems remain extremely popular in the West––as I feel they should be after experiencing…
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Dunk Tank
by Kayla Czaga Dunk Tank is a collection of poetry of the sort I quite enjoy, in form, specifically. Though Czaga writes free verse, she maintains a structure through the repetition of similar sounds rather than tight rhymes, and this is used to great effect within her work in at least a few ways, all…
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Tarzan of the Apes
by Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan of the Apes is the book that introduced the world to the now all but ubiquitously known king of the jungle. After the death of his parents in a remote region of Africa, the infant Tarzan is raised by a great ape, taught to survive in the wild. As he…
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Sugar Run
by Mesha Maren Eighteen years after being sentenced to life in prison in the late ’80s at the age of 17, a lawyer takes interest in Jodi McCarty’s case, resulting in her release. Sugar Run bounces between two periods: running off with her lover, Paula, to find happiness and easy money on the fringes of…
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Fight Club
by Chuck Palahniuk Though it feels at least a bit silly to write up a synopsis for a book as famous as Fight Club, a review without a synopsis conversely feels incomplete. (Those who don’t believe me are welcome to check out some of my older reviews in which I believed synopses to be frivolous.)…
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Big Lonely Doug
by Harley Rustad In the midst of exploring Vancouver Island on the hunt for the oldest and largest trees, T. J. Watt, a photographer for an environmental organization, the Ancient Forest Alliance, stumbled upon a fresh clear-cut with an unusual feature: A solitary tree was left standing, and it happened to be one of the…
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The Good Soldier Schweik
by Jaroslav Hašek The Good Soldier Schweik is said to be one of the most famous pieces of Czech literature that exists, if not the most famous. It’s at least the most widely-translated and far-reaching novel to come out of the region, with lasting influences on language and culture in the Czech Republic and elsewhere….
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