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Saturday, June 07, 2014

La Far Eric Linsker




Eric Linsker




La Far
Eric Linsker
Copyright © 2014 by Eric Linsker
The Iowa Poetry prize
University of Iowa Press
Iowa City, Iowa
95 pages, $19, softbound

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

“Linsker’s poems splice and complicate realms and modes and sensory domains with
wit and acute musical edgework. They are deeply, quixotically enjoined in the hard and
essential ‘grief of eternal joy.’” –Emily Wilson, judge, 2013 Iowa Poetry Prize.

Do blurbs and the poetry they are about have to be inexplicably obtuse?  Perhaps in Iowa, out among the cornfields it is the thing during long sessions of boredom watching corn grow or a long winter of dealing with snow blowing across buried fields.

So many good accessible poets and this book by a poet who, “holds degrees from Harvard and Iowa Writers’ Workshop” is picked, perhaps because of the degrees
or perhaps for its incoherence.

Now perhaps readers of this review have a better take on what the author is saying
than I do, but let’s look a “Love Streams.”

He was choosing colors, sounds
Of clouds, that year he was
Troubled with his room,
Through what philosophers

Of clouds, that year he was
Housed and thunderous, wet
Through. What philosophers
He read, he hid

Housed, and thunderous, wet
Windows, differently pulled,
He read he hid
By time, a glass hand.  Through


Windows differently pulled
The rain like school to where
By time, a glass hand through
His hair brushed back

The rain. Like school to where
Sits a desk, the chair that had been
His hair brushed.  Back
At the window now a clearing

And so on and on this poem continues, three pages worth of tedium, like watching corn grow or snow in mid January blow across an empty Iowa field. 

I would apply the same to the “Land of Reasoning” which begins with more forgettable lines:

In the clutches of song the survivors
Enter the earth no longer looking
For those they have lost that was
Another time even the underworld changes


Quite frankly I did not find this a redeeming volume of poetry despite winning The Iowa Poetry Prize and who needs to say that just because it won the prize that it is a prize winner?   Does this book truly represent great talent or  rather who one knows? 

So here are some opening lines with titles in parentheses and with which I present my case:

What else would we want if we were
good am I here  (The Unities)

In the verdure of the word smoke
A manhole opened outside her
None in her family read   (In the Raid Instances)

red trillium

It starts to snow shut.  (A Place Where Everything is Visible)

All I know is that when I sit down to read a book of poetry I seek the accessible, the sensible, the enjoyable, the book I want to remember.  I did not find any of these here,
though for many of you it may be the opposite experience. I hope it is.


___________________________________________________
Zvi A. Sesling
Author, King of the Jungle and  Across Stones of Bad Dreams
Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review
Publisher, Muddy River Books
Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 7 & Anthology 8

Friday, June 06, 2014

Artisan's Asylum: A Warehouse of Creativity in the Old Ames Envelope Building







Artisan's Asylum: A Warehouse of Creativity in the Old Ames Envelope Building
By Doug Holder

The last time I was at the Ames Envelope factory building in Somerville, Mass. it produced envelopes and such. But the times have changed and it is now occupied by the Artisan's Asylum. In the lobby of the Asylum I was met by Molly Rubenstein. She is an intelligent, hard -working, 20-something Yale graduate with a gift for expression, and a lot of energy. Rubenstein has been at the Artisan's Asylum for three years and for much of that time lived in Somerville, but recently defected to the Republic of Cambridge. The Artisan's Asylum houses 150 studios, of 50 to 250 square feet. They are demarcated by low barriers, so people can readily see each other. This according to Rubenstein fosters community and communication.  The Artisan's Asylum was in the forefront of the “Makerspace” movement of the past decade, where craftsmen, engineers, artists, writers and others share a large space, share resources, and create within a supportive and creative milieu. Rubenstein told me: “25% of the people here have active businesses, and another third are developing businesses.”

Within this building are state of the art computers, tools, and a whole array of material and resources members of the community can draw from. The Asylum is for the most part staffed by volunteers. The exceptions are Rubenstein, Robert Masek—the operations manager and Jessica Muise—the member services director. Gui Cavalcanti, the founder, is not part of the administration anymore but he maintains a studio where he works on robotic projects.

Rubenstein is a very adept guide, and showed me around this high- tech and low-tech maze of studios, work spaces, tangles of arcane equipment, the gangly arms of robots, the twisted beauty of metalwork pieces by Gretchen Greene, a common space inspired by the TV show “Dr. Who”—a veritable carnival of ingenuity and creativity.

Being an “old school” kind of guy I was glad to have Rubenstein act as a translator for this new world. One place she showed me was a bike shop which consisted of reconstructed bicycles, with things like Barbie Dolls and Voodoo heads attached to the handle bars. Bikes are often constructed from parts found in scrap or junk yards and old, discarded bikes. The shop is run by long-time Somerville group named the "SCUL”.When driving home at night you may see this group in a fleet of  eccentric tall bikes and their owners traversing the streets of Somerville.

Rubenstein also showed me the studio for the “3 Doodler” project invented by Maxwell Bogue and Peter Dilworth.   This project, that was funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign developed a 3D printing pen that creates intricate paper and plastic images. Rubenstein showed me a lovely 3D representation of the Eiffel Tower and something decidedly more abstract that this gem of a pen created.

Later I was introduced to a gangly fellow, with skinny arms and legs—no—not me--but a robot named “Stompy.” This denizen of the Asylum looks a bit like an elevated metallic crab that has been developed as part of “ Project Hexapod.” It can be used for entertainment purposes, but it also has possible applications as a walking terrain vehicle to transport material-and according to Rubenstein can prove to be helpful with the many natural disasters we face today.

Rubenstein also showed me their impressive woodworking shop, their welding spaces, their advanced computer center, where I saw a couple of youngish engineers working on various projects. The center is sponsored by a number of concerns including: AUTODESK, MATHWORKS, SOLIDWORKS and others. Rubenstein also told me about the impressive number of courses that are offered in the Asylum and that are open to the public.

Of course the subject of the gentrification of Somerville reared its ugly head. The city is increasingly expensive and in spite of what the powers-that-be say—if you been around the block a little you know the drill: a lot of folks are going to be displaced. Rubenstein said: “We have a 5 year lease. We are a non-profit, but we have outside funding. We are looking to get long term support as our rent will likely double. “ In that case, and many others, unique and creative enclaves that have given the city an enviable cache will be forced to move out to places like Lynn and Malden—further away from the center of the city.

The Asylum is open to all of the community with just a very few exceptions, like people who work with toxic substances, etc… Rubenstein said to get a space here may not seem cheap, but it is if a person thinks of the resources: tools, computers, material, machines it offers it is a bargain.

Hopefully with its hunger for reinvention the city will not eat its own, and leave Union Square just another place with trendy restaurants, and luxury condos. And that my friend—is the way it is-in the “Paris of New England.”

Thursday, June 05, 2014

Interview with Andrew Sofer: A poet involved with the theater and all that dark matter


Andrew Sofer





Interview with Andrew Sofer:  A poet involved with the theater and all that dark matter

Interview with Doug Holder



Andrew Sofer grew up in Cambridge, England, and, after boarding school, studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Boston University, and the University of MichiganHis numerous poetry awards include Southwest Review's Morton Marr Prize; Atlanta Review's International Publication Award; First Prize in the Iambs & Trochees Contest; and New England Poetry Club's Gretchen Warren Award. Wave, his first book of poems, was named a finalist for the Morse Prize, the Donald Justice Award, and the New Criterion Prize. Andrew has acted and directed widely, and his writings on theater include the acclaimed book The Stage Life of Props. He teaches in the English department at Boston College. I had the pleasure to interview him on my Somerville Community Access TV show Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer




Doug Holder: You have written about “dark matter” in the theater. So does dark matter-- matter that you can’t see on stage, really matter in the theater?

Andrew Sofer: Dark matter matters such that you can’t have theater without it. Theater that does not engage with things you can’t see is not stimulating the audience’s imagination. What you don’t show can be more powerful than what you do show. For instance in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot—a character never appears-we imagine he is there but he is offstage. The theater is built up of things that we are shown and things that are not shown. And when they work in tandem you get something very powerful. Playwrights are attuned to the way the audience’s imagination can build and build. Unlike film—theater leaves a lot of things to the imagination. This is what I was trying to explain in my book. The theater event is a collaboration of the actors on the stage, the imagination of the playwright, and the audience.


DH: Your poetry collection Wave (2010) deals with among other things the memory of your father. Do you find you see your father’s face in the mirror and do you like what you see?

AS: That’s a wonderful question. It is true my father died in his early 50s when I was nine years old. Now I am a couple of years shy of my late father’s age of death. My father was an academic-- a sociologist.  The epigraph from my book is from Yehuda Amichai: “And for the sake of remembering, I wear my father’s face over mine.” My book in some ways is about the ways we wear our father’s face especially when we are older. I like to think that I carry on like him. He was a very engaged and passionate man.

DH: You have written about props in Samuel Beckett’s plays. The sets are pretty threadbare…not that many props to speak of.

AS: I have always loved Beckett’s plays. Props are talismanic for actors. They fight them; they love them. Beckett portrayed the struggle between the human and inanimate in his plays. Beckett has humans drop out of nowhere and they have to figure out what they are doing on stage. This is true of the props too. They are estranged and distorted.  There is the comical struggle between the human being and the props or objects, in which the humans are trying to get the objects to serve them, and the object is basically saying:" I can’t serve you.” If you think of the famous tree in Waiting for Godot –the two tramps try using the tree to hang themselves—then try to get the tree to symbolize something, but it refuses. Beckett’s work is comical—it is existential insult to humans who try to manipulate things.

DH: How do you write poems? Are you rooted in ideas or things?
AS: I don’t write my poems based on ideas. I don’t try to start with the concrete. My poems are rooted in place. I even research the place sometimes to get a sense of it. I would say my work is philosophical but I am delighted if I never use an abstraction. Seamus Heaney said:  “Never use an abstraction when something concrete will do.” For instance, if I know the name of a tree, I will name it. I try to be accurate in my poetry. The more concrete I am it invariably leads to conceptual dimensions. I want to first give an entry into reality—some ground to stand on—then I can branch out in many ways.

Dh: You are Jewish and you teach at the Catholic college Boston College. How is this for you?

AS: I like the fact that my students take religion seriously. They have knowledge of the bible. I t is difficult to teach English literature to kids that don’t have a sense of the biblical template. The stories behind English literature are invested in biblical narratives. In terms of Boston College—we have a Jewish Studies Program and it is a Jesuit institution dedicated to intellectual openness. It has been a good intellectual environment for me.

Wednesday, June 04, 2014

Come Over and Help Us By Kevin Gallagher





 
Come Over and Help Us
By Kevin Gallagher
Aldrich Press
Hemet , California
ISBN: 13: 9780692022436
37 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

In our brutish lives of bread and circuses poems that touch our sensibilities must speak to us in ensorcelled ways. Some poets show us the numinous hidden in everyday objects and the possibilities of contentment among those objects; other poets urge on rebellions of universal thievery and religious heresy. Kevin Gallagher presents us with both of these views, and all within his modest but provocative collection entitled Come Over and Help Us.

The title itself exudes a film of irony over Gallagher’s poems before you crack the book. It comes from the Massachusetts Bay Colony seal and refers to the Indians inhabiting New England in the 1600s and their supposed need of missionaries and the goodness that flows from commercial trade. Besides this logo, the seal had the image of a placid-looking Indian with an arrow pointed downward symbolizing peace. The new colonists, however, had more in mind than sharing benefits (and there were some!) with the Native American peoples. Gallagher’s persona relates an aspect of what followed in sonnet III of his opening sequence,

Once I had some all I wanted was more
So I had to rob the entire store

But after I ran out onto the street
I became drenched with rain, pelted with sleet

So I realized I had to dry the place
By sucking up the entire sea

Until it made balloons out of my face
That lifted me above forests and trees

So I could look down at it all and see
That all of it had to be mine, all mine…

The poet complains of a society that cannot understand how the play acting of do-gooders can turn into an anarchist’s violent rage. Romanticized Robin Hood characters and happy hobo stereotypes only carry a broken society so far. Gallagher’s persona makes his point in the closing lines of sonnet VI,

So now is the time to put on your mask
And hide under the bridge with the trolls

It’s easy for you to step to the task
Blow dynamite for heads to roll

It’s amazing that some people moan
When so many hearts are open and roar

Mulling over the new national order in sonnet IX the poet balances freedom against safety. Not surprisingly, freedom loses. Neither can one count on divine intervention. The poem ends this way,

Lines between risk and hope have to sever
When trying to be safe but also free

We cannot count on angels to hover
In our sunny world of uncertainty

There’s only one way to guard the safe
Let no one inside or out of this place

This poet wears his idealism on his sleeve. He speaks of a children’s crusade in sonnet XII for God’s sake. When these visions gain reality something very bad usually happens. But I quibble. The poet’s heart is good and that counts for a lot. One provocative image in this surreal setting follows. Gallagher cautions us,

From one bloom can come a thousand flowers
Each one of them powdered with pollen on top

So when we sneeze all seeds are released
And new Bethlehems everywhere are born

Scores of children on a mission for peace
And let it be known we have been warned

If we don’t close our eyes we cannot see
All the punctuation we need to live…

Parishioner’s Song, a poetic hymn of troubling despair, drives home the limits of religious ceremony. After describing the Catholic rites of communion and processional Gallagher lets reality intrude in the last couplet. The poem concludes,

We fill our chests and sing in unison.
We sound like one voice singing very loud.

An altar boy proceeds first with the cross,
he is followed by the deacons and priest.

We all continue to sing for the cause
begun three days after the final feast.

For these few moments no one here is lost.
The families leave in arms all in one peace.

Perhaps the most curious poem in the collection, Dead on Wheels, Gallagher dedicates to Boston Brahmin poet John Brooks Wheelwright. Among other things, Wheelwright wrote a poem entitled Come Over and Help Us (A Rhapsody). He was also an unapologetic Marxist whose poems could barely contain his rage against society. Gallagher details that lost Brahmin culture of brightly colored oak doors, raccoon coats and canes (always canes) neatly. Then the poem takes a turn toward elegy; it becomes a lament for Wheelwright. The poem opens with these lines,

Strong oak doors on Back Bay roads have bold
colors because the Brahmins would go blue

and say “take me to the end of my road,
the bright red door before the Castle!”

Modernity took a heavy toll
by 1940 they’d drive home themselves.

My favorite poem in this collection, Chorus, Gallagher uses as his final piece. It is a tightly controlled villanelle and an unsettling political poem. I believe he references atrocities in the “dirty war” which took place in Argentina between 1976 and 1983. Here’s the heart of the poem,

Thrown from helicopters in the sky
then washed on the banks of the River Plate.
They got to play god with all our lives.

Decided who lived, decided who died.
So we cried and marched every Thursday.
It’s hard to find out your life is a lie.

That is what motivated us to try.
That is what motivated us to pray.
They tried to play god with all our lives…

Gallagher’s humane and determined poems collar you and demand attention. It is one of the best collections of poetry that I’ve seen this year.

Tuesday, June 03, 2014

Poets in the Asylum: at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival Panel discussion report by David P. Miller





( Left to Right)  Bob Clawson, Kathleen Spivack, and Doug Holder

 

Poets in the Asylum: at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival

Panel discussion report by David P. Miller

McLean Hospital, the famous psychiatric hospital located in Belmont, Mass., has been the temporary habitation of many creative people. Among the best-known are the poets Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, with Anne Sexton as a short-term visitor. Doug Holder, poet, professor at Endicott College, and co-founder of Somerville’s Bagel Bards, has led poetry groups at McLean on both closed and open wards since 1982. At the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Salem, on May 3, 2014, Holder facilitated Poets in the Asylum, a panel discussion with poets Kathleen Spivack and Bob Clawson.

Kathleen Spivack, author of With Robert Lowell and His Circle (Northeastern University Press, 2012), arrived in Boston in 1959, having received a fellowship to study with Robert Lowell. Although Lowell was not, in fact, expecting her, she became his student and lived with the Lowells for a time, getting to know Sexton, Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Elizabeth Bishop, among many others. She noted that McLean Hospital was the “private playground” for Boston Brahmins. It was a kind of elite merit badge to have had a nervous breakdown and be sent to McLean, to the extent that those who weren’t admitted to McLean wanted to be.

Spivack emphasized that Lowell, Plath, and Sexton managed to write in spite of their illnesses, tortured-poet clichés to the contrary. Lowell’s hospitalizations were of no help to him. He dreaded his manic episodes, finding them “boring and a waste of his time,” according to Spivack. She observed that his mental illness, far from feeding his creativity, “cost him everything” in his personal life. His manic episodes were sometimes heralded for his poetry students by his unexplained absence from class, or with onsets in the middle of class periods. At those times, Plath and Sexton would look at each other, knowing what was about to happen. Spivack would “withdraw from the scene” during Lowell’s breakdowns, as she could not bear to witness them, though she did visit Lowell in the hospital.

Kathleen Spivack shared many insights on the subject of how mental illness was treated during that era, with particular focus on the poor treatment that Plath and Sexton received. Lowell was given Lithium, a new drug at that time. Although it helped him for a period, the drug was a “blunt hammer” that eventually “eroded his heart.” One other problem with Lithium is that people tended to stop taking the drug when they felt better, which of course set the cycle in motion again, as happened to Lowell. With the exception of Sexton’s first psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Orne, she and Plath were handed to doctors so inexperienced that they were sometimes their first patients. The doctors had no idea of how best to help them and/or demonstrated appalling behavior, including sexual exploitation. (One doctor replied to Sexton’s reporting of marital abuse by advising her to wear nice lipstick and put on an attractive nightie.) Spivack observed that Sexton’s “voices” were her unexpressed rage. Plath, too, expressed pain and rage in her journals. Such expression was considered revolutionary in women’s writing at the time, and was not praised (as Lowell’s Life Studies also was not). Spivack noted that even today, when she teaches the poetry of these women to French and North African students, they are strongly impressed by their anger.

Concluding, Kathleen Spivack said that Sexton and Plath continue to serve as role models for her. The ongoing heartbreak of their deaths is that, for all their significant accomplishments, we will never have the chance to read their work in its maturity. In comparison with Lowell’s longer career, for the two women, “we saw their beginnings [and] we saw their adolescence” as poets.

Bob Clawson, friend and confidante to Anne Sexton for ten years, was also the manager of her band, Anne Sexton and Her Kind. He met Sexton while teaching high school. Several of his students chose her work to study. He was not familiar with her work, and as a result he arranged for her to meet them (and him). Clawson noted that her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, is not about experiences in McLean Hospital, but about other hospitals where she stayed: Westwood Lodge, and Glenside Hospital in Jamaica Plain. She apparently would have preferred McLean, but had only a single five-day stay there for an examination. She was teaching during this short period, which apparently gave rise to the legend that she continued teaching while hospitalized.

Clawson read three of Sexton’s poems: “You, Doctor Martin” (for Dr. Orne), “For John, Who Begs Me Not To Enquire Further,” and “Music Swims Back to Me,” relating them to her struggles with mental illness and self-expression. Martin Orne encouraged her writing: she brought many poems to him. By contrast, John Holmes, her first poetry teacher, strongly disapproved of her working with personal trauma as a subject – something very much out of bounds in the poetry world then, pioneers like Lowell notwithstanding. This advice was useless to Sexton, of course. Clawson also discussed the origin of her band. She and Clawson were teaching high school in Wayland. After she read some of her poems, a football player student set some to music. This provided the impetus to form Anne Sexton and Her Kind. The band performed for three years around the country, but did not tour, as one performance a month was all Sexton could manage.

An engaged audience discussion followed the presentations. Most of the conversation focused on aspects of the poets’ work or the circumstances of their deaths. Both Spivack and Clawson emphasized, though, that the latter is not a favorite subject for them, and is given far too much emphasis generally. It is not the deaths of these poets that live - it is the work that lives, and remains compelling for readers and poets around the world. In the end, madness, breakdowns, and hospitalizations are obstacles, not romances - and suicides remain tragedies.








 *******************   David P. Miller’s poems have appeared in print in Meat for Tea, Stone Soup Presents and Durable Goods, and online in the Muddy River Poetry Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, and the Boston and Beyond Poetry Blog. His chapbook, The Afterimages, is forthcoming from Červená Barva Press.  His has three “micro-chapbooks” available from the Origami Poems Project website. David was a member of the multidisciplinary Mobius Artists Group of Boston for 25 years, and is a librarian at Curry College in Milton, Mass. He has often been seen in the company of one or more of the Bagel Bards.


Monday, June 02, 2014

Now 100 Years Later: Guillaume de Fontclare’s new book Inside My Own Skin Remembers World War I






Now 100 Years Later: Guillaume de Fontclare’s new book
Inside My Own Skin Remembers World War I

article by Michael Todd Steffen



As the director of a World War I museum in the Somme Valley, one of the most fierce battle zones of the Great War in France, Guillaume de Fontclare on one occasion had the opportunity to witness the unearthing of human remains, to discover firsthand what the earth does to a body over the course of ninety years. To be precise, I should say two bodies:

 "the hand of one man once held the bayonet which had plunged into the chest of the other, while the latter had thrust a dagger into the former’s throat. They had both tumbled into a trench that an artillery shell explosion then collapsed back on top of them. The vision of these two skeletons skewered one to the other will never leave me."
(Inside My Own Skin, p. 18)


De Fontclare’s book appears in its English translation brought out by Hanging Loose Press this spring aptly upon the centenary of the beginning of World War I. It is a personal narrative about a man who has been fated to a terrible physical disorder “of unknown etiology” which causes him excruciating chronic pain, yet has also been given by his position as director of this WWI museum known at the Historial, a medium of historical and spiritual reflection upon the human catastrophe of the trench warfare battles in the Great War. The ailment serves as de Fonclare’s passport to that world past and beyond of carnage, its dead and its wounded:


I am…the director of the Historial, the Museum of the Great War in Péronne, in the Somme Valley. There, I rub shoulders with the ragged, the maimed, the dismembered, the disappeared, the mangled, and the broken-face veterans of the “Great War.” I am the most living of all these ghosts. Had I been alive seventy years ago, I could have passed for one of them: a great wounded, great decorated, great survivor.
(p. 7)


The author’s next utterance in this passage—“But my wounds are not from war”—though a temporally necessary statement, can be argued with, in the anagogical interpretation Dante used to see the suffering in the Divine Comedy. History resonates to its welcomed witnesses so powerfully as to bring their current lives purpose and meaning in relating that history. De Fontclare’s account thus “speaks” with the passion and probability of a survivor’s. Upon these qualities history as an intellectual discipline keeps performing the wonder of uniting past and present in our collective memory. Not that our desire for truth or to remember is so feeble, but that the ever evolving present is undeniable and persistent, nearly always, even on a dull Sunday afternoon, begging for attention like the flowers of spring.

     Afflictions come with doors open out of this bubble of the here and now, and grant the gift of insight into those a-temporal realms of what has been and what may lie ahead, is bound to come. That is why Inside My Own Skin serves beyond its historical reflection, as a reminder in general of the magnitude of horror and suffering that war, any war, brings to us, has continued, and will continue, to bring to humanity, until our will for peace has gained a more powerful conviction.

     Perhaps the only way to come to that conviction is by making the lessons of history (which we are bound to repeat if we forget them) personal. De Fonclare succeeds wonderfully at this by including ample passages about his personal, immediate life, allusions to his wife and two children, his regional and work surroundings, his physical ailments and memories of a happier, healthy youth. Translator Yves Henry Cloarec calls the text “proof positive that writing can be one of the most therapeutic forces in life.”

     Again and again, however, de Fontclare’s meditation finds it way back to the Great War days and its incomprehensible scale:

The Battle of the Somme began with an artillery barrage that lasted five days and five nights without ever letting up. July 1st 1916, on a front line twenty-five miles long, the actual offensive began. British forces bore most of the burden, as the French were quite busy indeed at Verdun. The campaign lasted until mid-November of that year. Those six months of combat were horrific: 420,000 British killed (80,000 of whom were never found); on the French side 200,000 dead (of whom 27,000 are still missing). As for the Germans, they lost 437,000 men on those fields.    (p. 35)

For its generous commentary interweaving reflections about his personal life, social observations and arguments, and the resonant nightmare of WWI in the Somme Valley, Inside My Own Skin is a valuable resource to historians, a witness for peace, and, thanks to the effortless translation by Yves Henri Cloarec, an accessible book of interest to sit down with for the general reader.

Inside My Own Skin
by Guillaume de Fonclare
translated from the French by Yves Henry Cloarec
ISBN 978-1-934909-39-3
is available for $18.00
from Hanging Loose Press
231 Wyckoff Street
Brooklyn, New York 11217-2208
www.hangingloosepress.com