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FEATURED SMALL PRESS:
Good news for readers (finally)! We've been browsing various solicitations from small presses over the past months, and we've struck gold, at last... Blue Heron Publishing, in Hillsboro Oregon, has made our day. This Review Section is a Feature of their work. Here's what we can let you know about some of the gems we've found in their collections... |
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Firstly, we are frankly astonished by the breadth, scope, and intelligence of the Left Bank series -- particularly in view our many combined years in education and publishing. But mostly, we are delighted. Literature is not dead; critical thinking is not dwindling; and "Generation X" speaks in these volumes individually and with purpose, in concert with the voices of both age and new maturity. Each collection in Left Bank strips off the adhesive binds of the "tired and trite" pop culture labels, giving readers a unique, and utterly palpable, reading of the new "tried and true." For teachers of secondary to undergraduate college/university studies, we're recommending especially Left Bank 3 (pictured above), titled Sex, Family, & Tribe. Edited by Linny Stovall, this collection includes works by Ursula LeGuin, Ken Kesey, William Stafford, Lawson Inada, Duane Niatum, and a host of other formerly "marginal" writers, brought together here to poke at the tender seams that bind our individual cultural and collective national constructions of gender, sexuality, community, and belonging. From anthropology to poetry and the piercing comics of Matt Groening, this is a volume that will engage students at most all levels of ability and interest. 
So goes a mandate issued a Vermont ski resort, "after it fired a chambermaid who did not wear her dentures because they didn't fit properly," according to a February 1993 issue of Labor Notes. Editors Linny Stovall and Stephen J. Beard have included a plethora of such anecdotes throughout Left Bank 4: Gotta Earn a Living, a collection which, while drawing on the raw and engaging journalistic style of Studs Terkel, moves a step beyond, in bringing a new generation of work experience to the page. Here we find one of the pre-eminent young Native American writers, Sherman Alexie (The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven; Reservation Blues) rendering a gripping poetic account of a robbery, called "Occupational Hazards," in which both the assailant and the convenience store clerk straddle a strange band of similarities:
The commonalities of desperation and survival are never made flat or cheap in this poem, as in the entirety of Alexie's oeuvre. And this is riveting poetry, like the best of Alexie's efforts, especially in the final moments of this selection -- which we do, of course, hope you'll search out and read. Also of note are works like Kate Braid's poetry about the female form inhabiting the "male domain" of physical labor; the elegant and caustically surreal images by Richard Stine; and Teri Zipf's notes on poverty, fashioned as "Correspondence and Conversations Concerning the Former Mrs. Kosiki," in which the writer compiles overdue bill notices, single strands of conversation, and other miscellany with such acuity that a full life is palpably exhausted on the page. (Our favorite line from this melange: "I will not stand in line with you if you're going to pay for that with food stamps." Words that live forever in the ear, if you've ever heard them uttered...) Which is more demeaning: imposed poverty; lackluster labor; the Marxian dissociation of product from producer; grueling labor; or the ridicule of co-workers and family for a job well done? Left Bank 4: Gotta Earn a Living reminds us that it's not a competition; that oppressions are equal; and that most of us inhabit a world where a job is just a job, and life is what we pressure out of the interstices.
Canéla Analucinda Jaramillo |
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Worst Pick for Multicultural Teaching |
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