April 10 5PM Vietnam Vet Writer Marc Levy discusses his new book " How Stevie Nearly Lost the War and Other Postwar Stories"

How Stevie Nearly Lost the War and Other Postwar Stories

“Rhythmic, visceral, laconic, powerful, Levy’s stories will haunt the reader long after reading them.” Nguyen Ba Chung, William Joiner Center

“… Any family member, any therapist, who wants to know something of the pain that vets carry in their heads and hearts…should read this book.”
Hamilton Gregory, author of MacNamara’s Folly

“His quiet voice details a variety of experience hard to come by. The stories click with a kind of muted rage, a majestic astonishment, the fine appreciation of deep irony, and unmistakable authority. Buy this book, and learn a thing or two about the war that defined and baffled and energized a generation.”
Larry Heinemann, author of Paco’s Story, recipient of the National Book Award

“Some of the most eloquent voices in the history of American war literature have come out of the tragedy of the American War in Vietnam. Enter Marc Levy, a dazzling stylist, who takes readers on a wild ride in this perfectly paced collection of stories. Funny and furious, his characters, with all their injuries, love and live to the hilt. How Stevie Nearly Lost The War is hard to put down. Levy is a master storyteller. This book will last.”Demetria Martinez, Mother Tongue

“His writing is about the aftermath that follows you home. His words flow like poetry, exposing the carnage and madness of war.”
Frank Serpico

“Touring around Khe Sanh in the gloomy fog, I was reminded of a passage in veteran Marc Levy’s excellent collection of Vietnam war stories, How Stevie Nearly Lost the War and Other Postwar Stories. ‘VA Shrink: Were you in Vietnam? Vietnam Vet: Yes. VA Shrink: When were you there? Vietnam Vet: Last night.’ ”
Matthew Stevenson, contributing editor, Harper’s Magazine, author of Reading the Rails

“Levy got me with his first sentence – ‘Anyone can say they were in Vietnam.’ I pay his work the ultimate compliment that I pay Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried– the lines between fact and fiction are blurred, and that, my friends, is exactly what Vietnam was like. Read this collection.”
Doug Rawlings, co-founder, Veterans for Peace

“In these days when those with power over our fate are working overtime to obliterate truth and memory, Marc Levy’s brutal honesty and authenticity are just what we need. His new volume of stories will not let you forget the reality of Vietnam and of war.”
H. Bruce Franklin, author of Vietnam and Other American Fantasies

Levy has collected some of his best short stories in a small but powerful book about life and death with the 1st Air Cavalry Division in Vietnam and his endless attempts since to describe, remember and deal with the memories and pain he still packs with him. “Wherever you were, whatever you did in war will always be with you,” he tells younger vets. “Always.”
Michael Putzel, The Price They Paid: Enduring Wounds of War

“In the words of his alter-ego in How Stevie Nearly Lost The War, Marc Levy writes with “the unerring chaos, the unpredictable beat, the cyclic consequences, the sorrow of war.” His prose breaks all bounds of fiction and non-fiction with exhilarating zeal. Get ready for a wild ride.”
Dave Zieger, director of Sir, No Sir!

These stories pull no punches. Something good or strange is always just around the corner. The best of them bring the war home — its casualties are tragic and frightening, yet almost hopeful in all their sorrow.
Paul Krassner, author of Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

A bold and troubling, surreal, rambling account of a Vietnam veteran’s struggles with PTSD and memories. A former combat medic, Levy’s travels and traumas in search of human kindness and understanding offer grim testimony to the aftereffects of war.
John Ketwig, author of …and a hard rain fell: A G.I.’s True Story of the War in Vietnam.

Poems of the Manhattan Project: Poet John Canaday to be interviewed by Doug Holder on Poet to Poet/ March 27/5PM

    SEE IT LIVE AT 5PM  at http://scatvsomerville.org 

Poems of the Manhattan Project

John Canaday is a Massachusetts-based poet whose work has been published in The New Republic, Slate,The Southern Review, Raritan, The Hudson Review, Poetry Daily, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other journals and anthologies (including a volume sponsored by the Hiroshima Peace Institute). His volume of poetry set in the country of Jordan, The Invisible World, won the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award in 2001. He has researched nuclear issues for many years; his study of the relationship between physics and literature in the context of the Manhattan Project,The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2000.

 Canaday's latest collection is Critical Assembly, which looks at nuclear weapons, in the poet's own words, "from the perspectives of the men and women who occupied positions of privileged intimacy with respect to their development: the scientists, spouses, laborers, locals, and military personnel involved in the Manhattan Project. The efforts of these individuals to 'make sense' of their experiences shaped the ways in which nuclear weapons have been inscribed into our culture and our psyches, a process that is surely among the most crucial transformations in human history."

March 20, 2018 Harris Gardner and Kirk Etherton Talk about the Boston National Poetry Festival April 5 to 8

Harris Gardner Co-founder of the Boston National Poetry Festival

Kirk Etherton--Board Member of the Boston National Poetry Festival

See the show live at 5PM at http://scatvsomerville.org

   For info about the festival...  https://www.bostonnationalpoetry.org/

Novelist Beth Castrodale Feb 27 5PM

Novelist Beth Castrodale

Beth Castrodale’s début novel, Marion Hatley, was a finalist for a Nilsen Prize for a First Novel from Southeast Missouri State University Press, and it was published by Garland Press in 2017. Garland will also be publishing Beth’s latest novel, In This Ground, in 2018. Beth recommends literary fiction on her website SmallPressPicks.com, and she has published stories in such journals as Printer’s Devil Review, The Writing Disorder, and Mulberry Fork Review. She lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.

see it live at  5PM:  http://scatvsomerville.org

Pantoums by Dennis Daly

Pantoums

by Dennis Daly

2018 Dennis Daly

Dos Madres Press

Somerville MA

ISBN  978-1-030029-85-3

Softbound, 67 pages (including notes)

No price given

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

One Poet whose work I always enjoy is Dennis Daly.  Whether he’s writing about experiences in Afghanistan, or in his habitat of Salem or translating Ajax from the Greek,

it is always interesting and most certainly educational.

In his latest book he turns his focus to pantoums, not my favorite form of poetry, but under his skillful writing they become both fascinating and enjoyable.

As he notes in his introduction, “Originating in Malay, prior to the fifteenth century, the pantoum probably developed from an oral tradition of rhythmic and repetitive rowing songs.”

Daly, in educating the uninitiated to this form of poetry goes on to say, “Pantoum are made up of quatrains. The modern form requires no set number of stanzas. The second and fourth line of each quatrain repeats as the first and third line of the next quatrain.” Of course there’s more to his explanation.

Finally Daly states, “American practitioners of this form have included John Ashbery, Donald Justice, and Marilyn Hacker.  In his book Pantoums Daly is very much a match for any of those written by those celebrated poets.

In his first pantoum Daly lays out the form’s history:

HARMONIES

For all men do there is an end,

They row and row to make pantoums.

Muscles ache, minds transcend

In happy moments one presumes.

They row and row to make pantoums,

Harmonies keep on coming,

In happy moments one presumes

All’s right that coaxes humming.

Harmonies keep on coming,

Insects skim the river.

All’s right that coaxes humming

Through mortality’s quaint shiver

Insects skim the river.

Muscles ache, minds transcend

Through mortality’s quaint shiver.

For all men do there is an end.

Now let’s look at his last pantoum in this most interesting volume. It is rooted in his many travels and reveals life in a different civilization:

TRUST

One trusts most those things unseen,

Unconquered battlement just out of reach,

Solidity projects a smokescreen,

A figure of fundamental speech.

Unconquered battlement just out of reach,

Where traitors conspire their plots,

A figure of fundamental speech,

Impaled by the writer-robots.

Where traitors conspire their plots,

Solidity projects a smokescreen.

Impaled by the writer-robots,

One trusts most those things unseen.

So these are the first and last poems in Daly’s book, and there are so many more good ones in between. Footnotes answer questions about some of the words, locations and historical context in the book.

Overall this is scintillating poetry by a fascinating poet who has seen and experienced much more than the average person.  The many poetic forms he uses in different collections he published conveys his breadth of knowledge.   This is a book well worth owning and reading

Author, The Lynching of Leo Frank, Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review

Feb 6, 2017 5PM Poet Gary Rainford

Poet Gary Rainford

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Gary Rainford is the author of two poetry collections, Salty Liquor and Liner Notes.  Gary’s suite of poems, We Are Here, was an honorable mention selected by Betsy Sholl for The Gabriel Zimpritch Memorial Poetry Prize.  His work is collected in the anthology, Take Heart, edited by Wesley McNair.  Down East magazine calls Gary a Maine poet at the top of his game.  Maine Today Magazine calls his latest book, Liner Notes, a tribute to music.  Gary teaches online for a college in New York, runs Island Verse, a creative writing literacy incubator, and serves as code enforcement officer and plumbing inspector for Swan’s Island where he lives year-round with his wife and daughter. 

Jan 23, 2018 5PM Poet John Cuetara

Poet to Poet: Writer, Electronic Media Scholar, Michael C. Keith Jan 16, 2018 5PM

Writer, Media Scholar, Michael C.Keith

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About the Author

Michael C. Keith is the author/coauthor of 30 book volumes and dozens of articles on the subject of radio and broadcast studies. In addition to his non-fiction titles, Keith has published over a dozen creative works, including an acclaimed memoir: The Next Better Place––a young adult novel: Life is Falling Sideways––and several short story collections: most recently Slow Train and Perspective Drifts Like a Log on a River. Mad Hat Press will publish his next story collection, Let Us Now Speak of Extinction. His fiction has been nominated for several awards, among them the Pen/O.Henry Award, the Pushcart Prize, the National Indie Excellence Award, and the International Book Award. He is professor emeritus at Boston College.

Dec 19, 2017 Poet Anne Elezabeth Pluto 5PM

Anne Elezabeth Pluto is Professor of Literature and Theatre at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA where she is the artistic director and one of the founders of the Oxford Street Players, the university’s Shakespeare troupe. She is an alumna of Shakespeare & Company, and has been a member of the Worcester Shakespeare Company since 2011. She was a member of the Boston small press scene in the late 1980s and is one of the founders and editors at Nixes Mate Review.  Her chapbook, The Frog Princess, was published by White Pine Press (1985), her eBook Lubbock Electric, by Argotist ebooks (2012), and her chapbook Benign Protection by Cervana Barva Press (2016). Recent publications include: The Buffalo Evening News, Unlikely Stories: Episode IV, Mat Hat Lit, Pirene's Fountain, The Enchanting Verses Literary Review, Mockingheart Review, Yellow Chair Review, Levure Litteraire – numero 12, The Naugatuck River Review, and Tuesday, An Art Project.

see the show live at  5PM    http://scatvsomerville.org