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
Revisionist Poetry – Creepy Island, v.3
From the river’s throat a dock-less spine of earthjuts—an island stitched to rumour.Moonlight stitches the reed-edges with wire,and the black water stitches back, slow and smooth. Windows that never lit keep their dark,a rowboat hung with three small shirts like flags.At the wharf, old men trade the same two words:“Once,” and then the silence swallows … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – Creepy Island, v.3
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay by Marilyn McCully
Marilyn McCully’s Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay performs the double service every good exhibition catalogue must: it documents a body of work that has long been underrated in mainstream Picasso scholarship, and it supplies interpretive apparatus sufficient to make that body of work matter anew. The volume — produced to accompany the Royal Academy … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay by Marilyn McCully
Revisionist Poetry – Creepy Island, v.2
An island rises from the black river,its shoreline a gravel throat the current keeps.A single lantern, unused, rocks on a stump;mattress springs tangle with reeds like ribs. People along the bank point and look away,their voices small and sharpened by the cold.Rumour skims the water like oil — thin, iridescent —and children’s names come and … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – Creepy Island, v.2
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Maker: Crafting a Unique Space by Tamara Maynes
Tamara Maynes’ The Maker: Crafting a Unique Space is at once a manifesto for tactile domesticity and a practical handbook for anyone who wants their home to read like a lived, handcrafted archive. Maynes—who writes from the vantage of a practitioner—treats making not as a hobby but as a mode of seeing: an attentiveness to … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Maker: Crafting a Unique Space by Tamara Maynes
The New Renaissance Mindset 