Book review: “On Wine-Dark Seas: A Novel of Odysseus and His Fatherless Son Telemachus” by Tad Crawford
Odysseus’s episode inside the cave of the cyclops Polyphemos plays an outsize role in Tad Crawford’s On Wine-Dark Seas: A Novel of Odysseus and His Fatherless Son Telemachus.
Telemachus, the narrator of this novel, is telling his story of life with and without his father. His audience is the bard Phemios who was an eyewitness to and a survivor of the bloodshed and violent death that Odysseus wreaked, with the help of Telemachus and two loyal workers, on the 100-plus…
Book review: “For the Duration: Poems” by Kathleen Naureckas
There is an elegiac quality to Kathleen Naureckas’s 2012 poetry chapbook For the Duration.
The title is a reference to the phrase she remembered in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, during World War II. It comes up in “False Faces,” a poem about Halloween in wartime: “We called what we wore on Halloween/false faces, not masks…” Hand-me-down costumes were common. She writes:
A new costume was not always to be had.
“There’s a war on” was an easy way of saying no…
Book review: “The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror” by Christopher Moore
Relatively early in Christopher Moore’s heartwarming tale of Christmas terror titled The Stupidest Angel, he notes:
According to the DSM-IV, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, you had to have at least two of a number of symptoms in order to be considered as having a psychotic episode, or, as Molly liked to think of it, an “artistic” moment.
Molly is Kendra, the Warrior Babe of the Outland, but that’s her stage name. She’s Molly Michon. Her days…