by David Blomenberg, Sycamore Review Contributor
 My strange reading coincidences continue. Wayne Miller’s wonderful poetry collection The City, Our City (a review of which appears in our most recent print issue) was part of an uncanny string of books I was reading that had to do with the formation and destruction of cities. The very next two books I picked up after writing that review continued the trend. It was a bit spooky, to be honest.
With a title like Songs and Stories of the Ghouls, it might at first blush appear as if the release date (at the beginning of November) of Alice Notley’s latest book might be part of a Halloween-themed publicity campaign. But considering that few poetry books get a publicity campaign of any sort, and in spite of ghouls and blood-sacs (more on that anon) and scattered …MORE
by Jacob Sunderlin, Co-Editor of Poetry
Ron Padgett, poet, author of some twenty volumes, memoirist, collaborator, badass, septuagenarian, translator, Okie, grandfather, has earned himself the right to start a poem thusly:
There’s not a lot of time to think when one is assailed by activities and obligations and even less time to do it when one is free of them because then one spends one’s time thinking about how little time there is.
Sometimes, when talking about poems, poets, or recent collections with poet friends, I’ll try and distinguish between poets I like “as a writer of poems” (read: poets whose techniques I find “fresh,” whose “voice” I respect, whose “language” is “interesting”) and poets whose work I like “as a Jacob” (read: poets I want to drink for breakfast). This is sometimes an unpopular (read: schizophrenic) perspective, but—for me—is the …MORE
by Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor
Thursday, December 1st, Shannon Cain will be taking part in the Purdue Visiting Writers Series on the Purdue campus in West Lafayette, Indiana. Please join us at the Krannert Auditorium, Room 140 at 7:30. Shannon Cain will be reading from her debut collection The Necessity of Certain Behaviors. The event is free and open to the public.
 Jane, the protagonist of “This is How it Starts,” the first story in Shannon Cain’s debut collection The Necessity of Certain Behaviors and winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize from University of Pittsburgh Press, is a girlfriend to both a married lawyer, who happens to be man, and a doctor, who happens to be a woman. She is also an artist living in her family’s rent-stabilized apartment in Manhattan who paints on panes of …MORE
by Conor Broughan
 When your kitchen is a mess—a plates-piled-high-in-the-sink, socks-getting-stuck-on-sticky-spots mess—how do you react? If you’re anything like me, a messy kitchen means that you clean up the coffee table in the living room or pick up clothes that have collected at the foot the bed. Rather than tackling dirty dishes, the grime on the sink, or whatever it is that has been growing behind the stove, I project the mess onto other portions of the apartment, allowing me to clean a minimal amount while still feeling accomplished for tackling a chore.
When we first meet David Lamb, the fifty-four year-old protagonist of Bonnie Nadzam’s beautiful, unsettling, and stunning debut novel Lamb, he has just buried his father, has recently divorced his wife, and has been forced to take a leave of absence from his job because of …MORE
 by Rob Davidson
Every good story collection has its governing metaphors, those common notes that blend the individual crooners into a concert of voices singing harmony. Restlessness defines the spirited characters in Patricia Henley’s fine new collection of short fiction, Other Heartbreaks. In these stories, people’s lives break down and are reassembled; there are changes of allegiance and sexual orientation; there are moments of great sweetness and moments of insufferable loss. As one narrator puts it, these are tales of “broken hearts, mended hearts, eternal stories of love lost and gained.”
Henley moves across the territories of her stories with deceptive ease, ranging back and forth in time, layering with moves both small and large, gradually filling in the context for a dramatic present that is always tied in interesting and complicated ways to the past. Henley’s stories require …MORE
by A.E. Watkins
 In a country and age without epics, we have only lyrics, each a minor hero that braves a domesticated and commodified world. Lily Brown’s first book, Rust or Go Missing, affirms the dangers of such a world, navigating the real hazards that hide in our postmodern (mis)understanding of the spaces we live in and live by. Each poem reminds us that, in such spaces, our speech is all that can condemn or save us.
Finding recourse in comic books and antiquated armor on display, these poems hint at the traces of the heroic and the extra-ordinary in our everyday. What works in these poems is a tension that arises from the Romanticism caught in the traps of quotidian rooms and quotidian love. In the book’s closing poem, “Museum Armor,” we find ourselves in an …MORE
by Patricia Henley
Many years ago when I had completed my first year of teaching fiction-writing, I had a drink with Leonard Robinson, former editor at Esquire, on his lovely front porch in Missoula, Montana. We got to talking about teaching. Leonard told me a very simple way to present the idea of tension to students. He said, “Imagine there’s a guy in an elevator at the top of a very tall building. The elevator breaks down and suddenly he’s plunged downward. There are at least two possible outcomes. And you might be rooting for one or the other.” This notion is at the heart of the story in Robert Olen Butler’s new novel, A Small Hotel. It is a textbook example of such tension — a real page-turner.
But it’s so much more than that.
Michael and Kelly …MORE
BY KENNY TANEMURA
 It’s difficult to find an arrangement of prose poems that seems to work well as a collection, or that extends beyond attempts to define this new and unique genre. Christopher Kennedy’s third collection of prose poetry, Ennui Prophet, is a rare exception to this dilemma.
In Christopher Kennedy’s hands, the prose poem is not a linear list of things but a skittish thread running through the narrative line. The second paragraph of “Museum of Wrong Turns” introduces a “roommate who thought Mr. Rushmore was a natural phenomenon.” The third and final paragraph begins with an “expensive vehicle” and ends with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. These prose poems have more in common with the contemporary American poems being written today than they do with the prose poems written a generation ago by poets as diverse as Charles Simic, …MORE
BY DAVID BLOMENBERG
 An old school teacher I didn’t know well retired and died in a small town south of here. He was loved by his gradeschool students and many children. He had a loving wife who died later on. In sorting through the house a box of documents was discovered that his wife perhaps didn’t know about. Perhaps she did.
The box was filled with letters and poems the teacher wrote. The box revealed he had an earlier wife, married at the height of young love. She died suddenly while she was still beautiful. The poems he wrote were to her, each one a variation on loss, like messages on voicemail: Why do you not answer? When can I see you again? Outwardly, he was happily married to his second wife, who grew old with him …MORE
BY DALLAS WOODBURN
 To borrow (shamelessly) a simile from Forrest Gump beginning a Jess Row story is like sampling from a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re going to bite into. In his most recent collection, Nobody Ever Gets Lost, the title story centers around a young woman struggling to come to terms with the death of her fiancé in 9/11. Another story, “Amritsar,” is written from the perspective of a middle-aged Sikh immigrant learning to fish from his son, who is planning to marry a white American girl. Row’s O. Henry and Pushcart-Prize-winning story “Sheep May Safely Graze” centers around a federal bureaucrat during the Reagan administration, grieving over the death of his young daughter in a freak boating accident at summer camp. The stories in Nobody Ever Gets Lost take …MORE
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