Review by Mack Hassler The Diaries of a Marshall Islands Peace Corps Volunteer (1975 – 1977) is a non-fiction volume that is loaded with wonderful photographs from a part of the globe about as distant from the snowy North as one can get as well as distant in time from…
Review by Mack Hassler So many people never live long enough nor have the inclination to write a memoir. Those who do have a great responsibility. Not only memory and accurate detail but also they need the art to construct something of imagination. I think Joe Kirkish steps up nicely…
Review by Mack Hassler I had just finished reading the 2023 collection of Clutch, which is published just at the edge of the UP, when this collection of poems by Michael Butterworth came in the mail from much farther distant but still with what I hear as deep resonance for…
Review by Mack Hassler I am a great believer in serendipity and feel lucky that during the past year, my name has gotten linked to the work of Zoschke as well as to Zoschke on Splake (see several reviews of mine over recent months) because now I am given a…
Review by Mack Hassler I think there is no argument that our writers who set themselves up as our poets are the real forerunners in language development. Storytellers entertain us, historians order and give us useful general ideas, comic tone writers defend us against the many predators that lurk in…
Review by Mack Hassler I think a writer develops a kind of cockiness that is helpful when he or she is accepted by the “teams” of publication in a culture. The great poet Virgil was close to the Emperor Augustus. Writers need patrons and mentors, and they need the teamwork…
Review by Mack Hassler This is my third review in six months of the work of this trickster with the Vonnegut-stolen name (t. kilgore splake) in the context of the “new literature” of the UP, and I think finally I begin to see clearly the profound loneliness of his chosen…
Review by Mack Hassler One of our great origin texts Genesis speaks of “giants in the earth” (chapter 6, I recall) prior to its own set of stories. These ancient “fathers” may have included the light dinosaur flyers. Some of the champion ski jumpers apparently make use of their trim…
Review by Mack Hassler Deborah K. Frontiera is a major voice in the writing of a UP literature, and I have been very interested in most of her work across several genres. She keeps trying new things. But history is a hard genre to get right. History is all we…
Review by Mack Hassler The Constipated Elephant: A Mystery at Pennington House by A. Jay may be one of the most confused storytelling piece of prose that I have read. The emphasis on character and on the apparatus of the novel as “fantasy” rather than just history, however, makes it…
Sons and Fathers in a New Place Review by Mack Hassler “ … in words begin responsibilities.” Louis Ginsberg to his son Allen Ginsberg in Dharma Lion (St Martin’s Press, 1992), 309. It is exciting to discover the Beat Generation in UP literature far from the Bay Area of the…
The Academy We Need Review by Mack Hassler In reading this solid new chapbook of poems by a fine poet, whom I had not heard of before, it is clear that being from Copper Country (Laurium) need not confine one to local color work. Johnson makes use of ideas, images…
Trout Fishing in our Own Lake Review by Mack Hassler Like many serious writers, this poet tinkers with his name for literary purposes. He invents an identity that links his work to the clever science fiction writer Kurt Vonnegut (Kilgore Trout) as well as to the Kerouac-type Beat writer Richard…
Life beyond shadows, poems by t. kilgore splake (Shoe Music Press, 2021); In Other Days, Roger Craik (BlazeVox Books, 2022) Haiku and Winnie-the-Pooh Review by Mack Hassler My friend and colleague, Roger Craik, has a very nice poem on A.A. Milne in the new collection of his poems In Other…
To Build a Tunnel by Deborah K Frontiera (originally published 2004) as volume one of The Chronicles of Henry Roach-Dairier From Fandom to Full Cultural Foundation Review by Mack Hassler In modern times, we often label this sort of enthusiastic imitation of types “fandom” as in science fiction fandom or…
