Have you read Irving Layton—so loud they praise him?They say he’s fantastic, yet what lingers is small: his smile,an imprint on the mind like a detached fly-wing—a pale shard of motion, exact and obscene. Have you listened to Whitman, the city’s long breath?Do you find him lavish—spilling clauses like summer light? Have you read Rod … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – Have you read the poet?, V.4
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden
Mike Mignola’s Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire reads like a found object from a ruined twentieth century: a book that is equal parts trench-mud odyssey, moral fable, and Gothic reliquary. Conceived by Mignola and written with Christopher Golden, it was published as an illustrated novel in 2007 and later expanded into … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden
Revisionist Poetry – Have you read the poet?, V.3
Have you read Irving Layton?They say he’s fantastic—but only his smile leaves marks,like a detached fly-wing: small, precise, obscene. Have you listened to Whitman?Do you find him lavish with his breath? Have you read Rod McKuen?They say he moves crowds,but only with a single-minded achefor men and women—like a moth circling a candle: predictable, hungry. … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – Have you read the poet?, V.3
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Joe Golem and the Drowning City by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden
Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden’s Joe Golem and the Drowning City announces itself as many things at once: an illustrated novel, a pastiche of pulp detective fiction, a piece of dark folklore, and a careful exercise in atmosphere. Published as an illustrated novel in 2012, it is a collaborative hybrid in which Mignola’s visual imagination … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Joe Golem and the Drowning City by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden
Revisionist Poetry – Have you read the poet?, V.2
Have you read Irving Layton?They say he’s fantastic,but only his smile leaves indelible marks—like a detached fly-wing: small, precise, obscene. Have you listened to Whitman?Do you find him lavish with his breath,sprawling praise across the city’s shoulders? Have you read Rod McKuen?They say he moves crowds—but only with a single-minded achefor men and women,like a … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – Have you read the poet?, V.2
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Paper Objects: New Directions in Paper Art by Gene McHugh
Gene McHugh’s 500 Paper Objects performs the deceptively ambitious work of making a single, humble material speak with the variety and insistence of a chorus. Arranged as a dense visual catalogue rather than a sustained monograph, the book stages paper not as a passive substrate but as an active agent: folded, torn, cast, burned, layered, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Paper Objects: New Directions in Paper Art by Gene McHugh
Revisionist Poetry – Creepy Island, v.5
From the river's throat a dock-less spine of earth juts up,moonlight stitching the reed-edges with a thin bright wire.Windows turn inward like closed mouths; a rowboat hangs idle,three small shirts looped over its oar — flags for nobody. Old men on the wharf barter the same two words: “Once.”The word folds into the nets and … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – Creepy Island, v.5
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Painting and Decorating Furniture by Sheila McGraw
An attentive manual that thinks like a maker and reads like a quiet manifesto Sheila McGraw’s Painting and Decorating Furniture presents itself at first glance as a pragmatic handbook: techniques, materials, step-by-step procedures. Beneath that useful surface, however, the book stages a subtler argument about how objects participate in our lives — about the ways … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Painting and Decorating Furniture by Sheila McGraw
Revisionist Poetry – Creepy Island, v.4
From the river's murk an island rises,a lantern on a stump that never burns.Three small shirts hang where no footprints go.Rumour skims the water like spilled oil. Men on the bank point with cigarette hands;dogs halt, ears pricked; shutters draw their teeth.Night settles with a bone-cold quiet.Only one reed argues with the dark. Footprints sink. … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – Creepy Island, v.4
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Good Bones, Great Pieces: The Seven Essential Pieces That Will Carry You Through a Lifetime by Suzanne and Lauren McGrath
At once primer and manifesto, Good Bones, Great Pieces stakes a modest but ambitious claim: a home’s durability—its capacity to endure fashions, life changes and moves—depends less on trend-chasing than on a coherent set of flexible, well-chosen objects. Suzanne and Lauren McGrath, a mother–daughter design team steeped in editorial and television worlds, lay out that … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Good Bones, Great Pieces: The Seven Essential Pieces That Will Carry You Through a Lifetime by Suzanne and Lauren McGrath
The New Renaissance Mindset 