The Voluptuous Horror of Louisa May Alcott

A few weeks ago, Lynn Messina asked me if I would be interested in hosting a literary event at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia theater on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, in which she, as the author of Little Vampire Women, would be teaming up with Porter Grand, the author of Little Women and Werewolves. Why, of course, I said; and would you like me to interview the two of you up there on the stage while we’re at it? Well, it turned out they already had a Louisa May Alcott biographer named John Matteson (Eden’s Outcasts) to handle that aspect of the evening—and good thing, too, as he’s probably much better qualified to talk about Alcott’s background in potboiler fiction. (For one thing, I’ve never actually even read Little Women, so I have my research work cut out for me over the next few weeks.)

So come join us at the Thalia on Thursday, May 6, as Messina and Grand discuss the challenges of taking a beloved American classic and rewriting it from top to bottom, and how you add a whole mess of monsters while still keeping the story close enough to the original to make the premise work. Among other things!

13 April 2010 | events |

Brett Eugene Ralph, “Emaciated Buddha”

Scarcely do we see him
lost in all his wandering,
dollop of cold rice in a dirty palm,
whatever slumber he can muster
hard won from snakes and rocks and seething rain,
the febrile congress of frogs, the unseen
unrest of insect worlds, the wind-
begotten complaints of the hunted, the haunted
creatures perishing in the dark.

Like Christ in Grünewald’s triptych,
he looks like a man who’s truly spent
a lifetime nailed to a shadeless tree:
skinny arms like tired entreaties,
face like a cave, each protruded rib
a distinct refusal, once and future
beauty of the body discarded
like a murky early draft.

A few months after Black Sabbatical was published last year, Brett Eugene Ralph spoke about the collection at Murray State University:

There’s also a ten-minute video of Ralph reading some poems at the inKY Reading Series in Louisville, Kentucky. Or you could watch him singing “Grandpa Was a Hobo” or “Charcoal Gray” with his band, Kentucky Chrome Revue.

12 April 2010 | poetry |