Staff Picks: Bald Heads, Baldwin, and Bruce LaBruce
Photo: Avid Bookshop in Athens, Georgia.
Sabrina Orah Mark’s Wild Milk, one of the book duo released this year by the small press Dorothy, is a debut story collection that displays just how compelling surrealism can be, even almost a century after the movement itself had its debut. Mark is obviously a talent in the vein of Leonora Carrington, maintaining the strange dreamlike atmosphere of her fiction without losing its sense of substance, using skillfully interwoven images that create tight seams between each story. The slim, square little book, published just this week, is a retreat into the fantastic, poetic, and playful—although every so often, much like in a dream, you catch sight of something you’re almost certain you recognize from waking life. —Lauren Kane
During a recent visit home to southwest Scotland, I was given a copy of , edited by Tom Pow. Originally from Galloway, left Scotland for New York in his early twenties. He would call this city home for much of his life, While Reid was perhaps better known for his translations, focuses solely on his original poems. As such, there is an impression of having the poet to ourselves—a sense that as readers, we don’t have to share him. His voice can be stern, though it’s frequently balanced with a smile—you can almost hear it, sometimes, creeping in around Reid’s eyes. It’s both a solemn and joyous collection. I particularly like him on faces—here are three of them: “Age has engraved his face. / Cradling his wagged-out chin, / I shave him, feeling bone / stretching the waxed skin” (from “My Father, Dying”). “From wearing a face all this time, I am made aware /of the maps faces are, of the inside wear and tear. / I take to faces that have come far” (from “Weathering”). “Here, one is grateful to the tolerant landscape, / and glad to be known by men with leather faces / who welcome anything but questions. / Words, like the water, must be used with care” (from “New Hampshire”).
