"I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged."

The above, it goes without saying, is the album cover of the year.

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Is there anything cuter than Rufus Wainwright in lederhosen?

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Ever notice how conservatives will resort to using words like "illegal," while liberals prefer to use "undocumented"?

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Song of the Moment: CSS - "Fuck Off is Not the Only Thing You Have to Show" [Sub Pop, 2006]

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Station platform scene. What unpredictable calm--it's the inner voice.
--Tomas Transtromer

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We need not know the details of history to recognize its children.
--Tony Tost

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Dislocate, the literary journal of the graduate creative writing program at the University of Minnesota, has published "Permanence."

With this event, modern American poetry has finally suffered creative collapse.

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I'm in the middle of drawing up a summer reading list. So far (have you any suggestions?), I've only been able to come up with the following books:

Nicanor Parra - Antipoems: How to Look Better and Feel Good
Various - Scoring from Second: Writers on Baseball
Eliot Asinof - Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series
Dave Eggers - What Is the What*

*denotes nearly completed; progress impeded by arrival of life events.

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I was looking forward to a cross-country road trip from Chicago to San Diego, but will have to do with with my own plans, tired heat.

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how do we make sense
of such evil,

ashen stream over
Murray Street