For over two decades, Attack Theatre has transformed otherwise unknown Pittsburgh sites into ultra-creative performance spaces. In their latest work, Laws of Attraction, they took on an old auto body repair shop located in Uptown. The two-act show was inspired by the study of science. About a year ago, the company taught creative movement classes …
Brett Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs by Lina Wolff trans by Frank Perry And Other Stories, 2015 $15.95 Swedish author Lina Wolff’s debut novel is a wonderfully complex and sometimes confusing journey. The plot meanders, the prose balances grittiness with the surreal, and our ideas about gender and love are challenged. While the novel …
1129 Tell all the Truth but tell it slant— Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth’s superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased Wit explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind— Emily Dickinson Three years ago at a coffee …
Ember Days by Nick Ripatrazone Alleyway Books, 2015 $16.00 COME BACK HERE. KNOW A GUY WHO CAN HELP YOU FIND THE BOMB. Ember Days opens almost immediately with this all-caps note—a message from a brother to a brother, a last-ditch effort to reunite, to collect a debt, and to repent for a wrongdoing. This is …
Waking the Bones by Elizabeth Kirschner The Piscataqua Press, 2015 $13.00 In her memoir Waking the Bones, Elizabeth Kirschner unravels the snarled strings of her life, weaving connections between her childhood traumas, her adult mental illness, and the redemptive power of self-reliance. Kirschner divides her memoir into clear sections, each of which anchors the short, …
The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected by Lynn Emanuel University of Pittsburgh Pres, 2015 $16.95 As a younger poet beginning her career, I’m interested in the process seasoned writers undergo when compiling a new and selected. Can the inclusion of older poems be likened to a band playing that first single, ten years …
Why Is It So Hard To Kill You? by Barrett Warner Somondoco Press, 2015 $14.95 Warner’s collection opens with, “I Thought Pigeons were Vegetarians,” a meditation on (and critique of) the concept of monogamy as expressed through the image of doves and love birds. Warner challenges preconceptions of married life and normalcy, the sickly-sweet ideas we’re often …
Rochester Knockings: A Novel of the Fox Sisters by Hubert Haddad Trans. by Jennifer Grotz Open Letter Books, 2015 $16.95 In Rochester Knockings Tunisian author Hubert Haddad brings to life with exquisite historical detail the theater and sensation of the Fox sisters, spiritual mediums who captivated the world in the mid-nineteenth century. Haddad travels through time and …