Archive - June 30, 2015

The winner of the 2015 Peace Corps Writers Best Poetry Book is THE CONSOLATIONS by John W. Evans (Bangladesh 1999–2001) John Evans was twenty-nine years old and his wife, Katie, was thirty. They had met in the Peace Corps in Bangladesh, taught in Chicago, studied in Miami, and were working for a year in Romania, when they set off with friends to hike into the Carpathian Mountains. In an instant, their life together was shattered. Katie became separated from the group. When John finally found her, he could only watch helplessly as she was mauled to death by a brown bear. In the quieter, daily emotions that continue after the formal occasions for mourning are over, and in the six years that follow Katie’s death, the poems of The Consolations articulate the dislocations and disruptions of grief in a continuing life. It looks to both past and future to make . . .

Deborah Solomon, art critic of WNYC radio, reviewed  two art books under the topic “Montmartre/Montparnasse” for the Sunday, June 28th issue of the NYTimes “Book Review.” One of the books was Stanley Meisler’s  Shocking Paris: Soutine, Chagall and the Outsiders of Montparnasse. Here, in part is what Ms. Solomon had to say about Shocking Paris: I far preferred Stanley Meisler’s “Shocking Paris: Soutine, Chagall and the Outsiders of Montparnasse,” which picks up where [Sue] Roe’s book [In Montmartre: Picasso, Matiss and Modernism in Paris 1900–1910] leaves off. In 1912, irritated by an influx of tourists who were crowding the cafes and poking around in his neighborhood, Picasso moved out of his studio in the Bateau-Lavoir and across the Seine to Montparnasse, on the Left Bank. Other artists arrived in short order. Among them was Chaim Soutine, a Russian Jewish exile who became the leading Expressionist painter of his era. For . . .