For many of us, the fact of National Poetry Month carries with it an injunction: Go and consume more poetry.
One would think all childhood discoveries are the joyous sort, filling the young ones with wide-eyed wonder and doting parents with pride and love. But the rite of passage Marcia Butler describes in her new memoir, about being a professional oboist while living a complicated double life in N…
Hey, a lot of people seem anxious to get a read on this Trump phenomenon — some literally.
This long overdue history of glam rock went from being a can’t-put-down read to an ill-conceived exercise in futility due to its superfluous final chapter. Titled “Aftershocks,” this chapter finds Simon Reynolds falling into the trap of so many latter-day critics who try to rationalize that …
When the Rolling Stones toured America in 1969 for the first time in three years, they found a more psychedelic landscape, but also a more violent one. Not only had a lot changed since 1966, a lot had changed since Woodstock four months earlier. Such was the reality of Altamont, the …
Benjamin Rybeck was born in Portland and grew up in Falmouth. He went to the University of Southern Maine before moving to Arizona at age 23. It took that move away from his hometown to be able to use the Port City as inspiration for his first novel, The Sadness.
When you get your morning coffee, you might not realize that Starbuck’s is named for the first mate in Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. Starbuck is the voice of sanity when confronted by Captain Ahab’s madness. Getting your coffee anywhere else, advertisers suggest, would be crazy.
The Sixties is the decade that won’t go away, and for good reason — its aftershocks are still being felt, and every new re-interpretation of that tumultuous time (I hesitate to say “decade” because the boundaries of the whole idea of “the sixties” are endless) helps us better understand wher…
Trouble Boys, journalist Bob Mehr’s excellently-researched and well-written 435-page bio of Minneapolis’s favorite indie-rock miscreants, the Replacements, isn’t just the story of a band, it’s the story of an era, and it’s a must-read for anyone who grew up in that time, not to mention anyon…
Cohen's parallels of ugly politics: American Maelstrom effectively views 1968 through prism of today
1968 was perhaps the pivotal year of the ‘60s, and the images that flashed around the world — the student riots in France, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the violence surrounding the Democratic convention in Chicago — were the ones that solidified the image of th…
There is something deceptively simple about Sarah Majka’s new collection of short stories, Cities I’ve Never Lived In. These are stories about memory, many of which take place in or around Portland, and they are stories written with a clarity that sometimes borders on the austere. But just a…
Portland is proud of its Art Walk history and its newer foodie trends. The city touts itself as one of the best places in the country to visit when you want great live music, an up-and-coming place to get down and dance, and a true melting pot of cultures and customs. Portland is also a well…
Renowned poet Tony Hoagland returns to Maine next week, to the state he called home for more than a decade and one he returns to each summer.
An intriguing and groundbreaking event Friday evening at Think Tank was the debut of a literary introduction series by The Authors Guild of NYC to promote up-and-coming authors across the country.
When the self-proclaimed “white trash” poet Wil Gibson first heard Beau Williams and Ryan McClellan perform their poems in Manchester, N.H. back in the late 2000s, he knew it was a match.
Sometimes writers spend years looking for their next book, and sometimes it finds them. Gay M. Grant, Maine author and congressional representative, spent years gardening, baking and sipping tea next to her British “mother-daughter-sister-friend,” Patricia Philips, before she realized that h…