Interview: Wild Cards—Artist David Wilson and the Great Lakes Tarot Deck
Fortune favors the bold. Ohio artist David Wilson’s life journey has seen a typical array of ups, downs, and divergent paths, but it all led (more or less) to his […]
Review: Lynn Sloan’s Midstream Carries Readers on a Cinematic Tour de Force
Unlike the turbulent 1970s she lives in, Polly Wainwright is determined to be calm, competent, and professional. She’s got a boyfriend making a name for himself as a war correspondent […]
Review: Kathleen Rooney’s Where Are the Snows Meets the Present with Wry Humor and Hope
The title of Where Are the Snows, Kathleen Rooney’s new, award-winning collection of poetry, serves as both question and commentary to start off the book. Where are the snows, anyway? […]
Essay: Walking Graceland Cemetery with—and Without—Adam Selzer’s New Book
Near the end of my hourlong walk around Graceland Cemetery the other day, I went past a stone obelisk, maybe 30 feet tall, and noticed this on the side: SANDRA […]
Review: Making Friends With a Poet, The Poet’s House, by Jean Thompson
Carla Sawyer is a tall, smart-alecky 21-year-old who’s working for a landscaping company until she figures out what to do with her life. She’s on a job in one of […]
Review: The Seed-Germ King: Louis Sullivan’s Idea, by Tim Samuelson and Chris Ware
Louis Sullivan’s Idea, a biography of the 19th century Chicago architect, by Chicago’s first cultural historian Timothy Samuelson, is, in the most literal sense of the word, a beautiful book. […]
Review: All Those People, All Those Lives, Where Are They Now?, Graceland Cemetery, by Adam Selzer
Chicago is young. Compared with the large cities of Africa, Asia, and Europe—hell, compared with the Native American metropolis that occupied the Cahokia Mounds—Chicago is a mere toddler of 189 […]
Review: Wildly Contorted and Reimagined: Don’t Make Me Do Something We’ll Both Regret, by Tim Jones-Yelvington
In his story collection Don’t Make Me Do Something We’ll Both Regret, Chicagoan Tim Jones-Yelvington zestfully recasts gay men and boys in the central roles of a surprisingly wide array […]
Essay: How Many Books Can $30 Buy at the Newberry Book Fair?
When I visited the Newberry Library Book Fair on Friday, I knew I had to come up with a strategy. It’s a locally famous sale, featuring tens of thousands of […]
Review: Poetry Jagged and Anguished, A Boy in the City, by S. Yarberry
The pain that S. Yarberry suffers as a transgender person is strikingly described in their new book of jagged, anguished poetry A Boy in the City. It is pain set […]
Poem for Today: Freedom
It happened in Ferris Bueller’s hometown In the Mayberry of the Midwest I first heard about it while listening to WXRT When Terri Hemmert played “All You Need Is Love” […]
Dialogs: Haymarket Books Launches Maya Marshall’s All the Blood Involved in Love
Haymarket Books describes itself as a radical and independent publisher, and in light of current events, I am grateful that they are still in the game. They have a new […]