Goose Hill

I enjoyed these re-imaginings of well-known tales in Norman Lock's short story collection Love Among the Particles . Lock enters classic stories like Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde after the curtain has closed and the audience is beginning to file out of the concert hall, when suddenly the cast returns for an encore performance--a final scene after the final scene. He also does this with the iconic 1932 film The Mummy and visits Henry James in a fictional New York outside of his own novels. At times I was even reminded of Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics in the more conceptual stories like "A Theory of Time" and "Ideas of Space." Although I certainly wouldn't call these stories easy-reading, I think you'll find that the challenge is worth the time and attention. I gave it 4 out of 5 stars.

Next fall Literary House Press will be releasing it's first poetry anthology, The Book of Scented Things: 100 Contemporary Poems about Perfume . Not only was I invited to co-edit this project, my boss (and LHP series editor, Jehanne Dubrow) also encouraged me to write a poem for it. Here was the prompt: you are given a specially selected sample of perfume and then you must write a poem that is inspired by or engages with that particular scent. We were pleasantly surprised by the enthusiastic response we received from the poets we solicited to create brand-new poems for this special project and we have been blown away by the results of their writing experiments.  But when I sat down to complete my  perfume-poem assignment, I must admit to being stumped. My chosen scent was Lime Basil & Mandarin by Jo Malone . And I liked  the scent and it did  conjure up some vivid images, but the problem was none of them felt meaningful. A page-worth of purely descriptive pass...