The Fragments of the Frame: On Alan Gilbert’s Late in the Antenna Fields
Laura Carter05.27.11
Laura Carter reviews Alan Gilbert’s new book of poetry, Late In The Antenna Fields, which she finds to be an "architecture of loss and longing," tinged with "a tension of the cool." But there "are laws to cool, and Gilbert names them, and they reside in signals and machines, but loosely. He takes off the layers of childhood intensity with a laid-back commitment to air and what it has melted from…" Poetry on Poetry…
Burn This Book: an interview with author Blake Butler
Laura Carter06.21.10
Could have put this one up weeks ago, ‘cept ye editor here couldn’t figure out how to blurb it. How to reckon a few lines on a book so poetic, yet lush with traditional narrative (if your idea of tradition spans from Samuel Beckett to Cormac McCarthy to Ben Marcus, taking a Lovecraft/Lynchian detour through a world familiar, close, suburban and simultaneously apocalyptically hellish… same difference?), as if all the tragedies you hear on the news distantly, the floods, the fires, the quakes were taking place on your own trimmed yard, or erupting from your esophagus and/or mind. So took weeks off to ponder it, and being summertime, our heads got swollen like a certain political character toward the end of said book to be blurbed, Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas. And finally Fanzine said wait, Laura Carter nails it here in her equally challenging and poetic intro; so fuck our blurb. Read her words and Butler’s in this interview. Butler, from Atlanta, is also the editor of HTMLGiant, author of the novella Ever and his next novel There Is No Year will be out on Harper Perrenial next year. -CM
