by James Benton
FROM: Los Angeles Review
Like a hurricane of images, or a tsunami of grief, Sweeny’s lines strain against a background of stability and coherence that barely holds together. The book is an elegy not only because the title tells us so, but because it performs its elegiac ritual without the filter of conventional form or syntactical coherence. If grief is inchoate, the poet asks, what language is sufficient to the duty it is called upon to perform? The answer is a language suddenly released from its duties to inform or to persuade—functions of containment, framing, and interpretation—a non-syntax left to its singular capacity to conjure the ineffable, to bring it into being.
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Summer Author Series & Aditi Khorana at Canoga Park Branch Library, LAPL – Teens Event
Nineteen years ago, a small independent press based in Pennsylvania—sadly now defunct—published my first book, a novella titled The Courtship of María Rivera Peña(Silver Lake Publishing). The story is loosely based on the migration of my paternal grandparents from Mexico to Los Angeles in the 1920s and follows the courtship, marriage, and family life of the cook Beto and the beautiful waitress María. Three years later, a longer, second edition was published under the same name but with a slightly different cover design. I am now exploring with a publisher whether we can publish a 20th anniversary edition that would include a scholarly introduction.
A is for ACTION: A Social Justice Book Club for Kids at Eagle Rock Branch Library, LAPL – Kids Event
SEVENTEEN AND HIGH, Nikki Darling swaggers down the middle of Garvey Boulevard, a busy thoroughfare in the San Gabriel Valley, as cars swerve around her: “‘Three Days’ by Jane’s Addiction is playing on my Walkman and I feel like I’m in a movie, like I’m an assassin.” She stands in the street with a cigarette hanging from her lips, with “someplace to be or maybe nowhere to go.” She taunts the cars as they pass: “Fly around me, motherfuckers! Fly around me like I’m not even here!”
Yesterday, L.A.’s Not A Cult Press announced on its Facebook page that Stories Books & Cafe has teamed up with them to sponsor their annual poetry submissions award. The award will now be called the Stories Award for Poetry. The winner gets a cash prize of $1,000 and a publishing deal with Not A Cult.
The atmosphere at the Virgil was electric. Beats from music spun by DJs filled the room with powerful comradery. L.A. writers filled the room in support of a member of the literary community from Fresno, poet Sara Borjas. The night emanated a bit of hip hop and club.