Prathna Lor

Prathna Lor is a doctoral student of English at the University of Toronto.

By this author

Building sex

Recently in Jacket2

Near/Miss launches

New from University of Chicago Press: paper, cloth, e-book
Audible.com has also published an audiobook of my reading of the full work.

Readership, responsibility, risk

A bit about Grigori Dashevsky

Timmy Straw

Handing out beauty salon fliers, Krasnoprudnaya Street

It’s February. The shortest month by the calendar, but by the senses’ tally the longest: across Moscow low liverish sky, damp chill. Snow is melting, disclosing the months’ accumulation of trash, giving the passerby a sense of return without the warmth of a homecoming. The worst of the cold gone, lone figures in a motley cast of costumes (mice, medieval European kings, rabbits, comic-book pharmacists being the most popular) take up their posts on the streets — handing out fliers for discount haircuts, free lawyers’ consultations, happy hour pelmeni at rock-bottom prices. Public spaces give off a new whiff of creatureliness, of steam, damp, the stock and store of dailiness.

A poem as a machine?

Margaret Rhee

William Carlos Williams wrote in his introduction to The Wedge (1944) that “[a] poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words”; or “poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines, its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.”[i] A poet and physician, Williams is most known for plums, the everyday, minimalistic, rhythmic meter and lineation.