
Although The Dance of No Hard Feelings is Mark Bibbins’ second book of poetry, nothing about this recently released collection feels sophomoric. Its bulk (just under 100 pages), its effortless political and didactic flourishes, its lapidary formal qualities and charismatic cadences give an impression of rare expertise.
Category Archives: Interview
Mark Bibbins: “We the Reader”
Portraiture of the Artists

Shakespeare and Company, the legendary English-language bookstore on Paris’s Left Bank, recently got a facelift. Several faces, in fact. Fourteen illustrated portraits of the Lost and Beat Generation writers who once frequented the store—and its predecessor—now adorn the staircase wall leading up to the second floor library of the bookshop. An interview with Badaude—the illustrator Joanna Walsh—with a slideshow of her mural as a work-in-progress.
Holly Goddard Jones: More than Girl Trouble

While the words girl trouble may conjure up images of teenaged girls talking on the phone about boys, please read further. Holly Goddard Jones’ debut collection Girl Trouble offers intimate character portrayals set in Roma, Kentucky. From unexpected pregnancy to murder, the characters find themselves in desperate situations which often render them helpless.
Is Violence Inevitable?: An Interview with Pier Marton
In late October, The School of Visual Arts held its 23rd Annual National Conference on Liberal Arts and the Education of Artists, entitled Visions of War: The Arts Represent Conflict. The week of events included a play, a panel discussion on photography, and a series of films exploring the emotional scars of war. The conference was held at the Algonquin Hotel, and I sat in on one of the sessions called Images of the Other.
Amit Chaudhuri
David Ryan
Christina McPhee
On the New Russian Realism: Questions for the Editors of Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia
Few countries have undergone more radical transformations than Russia has, so it’s easy to assume that with each geopolitical quake the country’s cultural continuity gets split along the resulting fault lines. But if one looks closer at contemporary Russian literature, there are more convergences than divergences with the country’s heritage. The stories in Tin House Books’ Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia offer 23 depictions of the so-called new Russia from some of its most talented young writers.
Reimagining the Expressway: Sufjan Stevens’ BQE
I met Sufjan Stevens in his publicist’s office adjacent to the Highline, a wonderfully successful example of urban planning. His latest work, The BQE, tackles a less popular industrial monument. The project continues Stevens’ characteristic ambition, consisting of a film, score, comic book, photo essay, stereoscopic Viewmaster reel and a short liner note essay. Over grapes and cashews we talked of his own experiences on the expressway and the lost halcyon days of unfettered capitalism.
Pressing Issues: Recession-era Indie Publishing
Despite the economic climate and whatever bleak circumstances could engender movies like this, Milano Chow and Megan Plunkett, recent graduates from Barnard and Pratt, respectively, have been running their own independent printing presses.
Tina Schula and Nicola Kast
SO WHAT EXACTLY IS CONCEPTUAL WRITING?: an interview with Kenneth Goldsmith
Stephen Elliott

The Adderall Diaries, a nonfiction work written by Stephen Elliott and out this month, is not a book about Adderall. And though Elliott’s intent was to focus on the murder trial of Hans Reiser, It really isn’t even a book about murder. While the trial lends The Adderall Diaries a focused storyline, the more intriguing parts focus on Elliott himself, as he attempts to piece together his past and his uncertain future.
Dread Scott
On the occasion of Dread Scott’s public art project …Or Does it Explode? in Philadelphia, the artist exchanged emails with BOMB Managing Editor Nick Stillman. Scott’s provocative work challenges pedestrians in Philadelphia’s bustling Logan Square to consider the fate of local high schoolers will be on view through November.











Throughout the ’80s, Christina McPhee used drawing and painting to investigate landscape and its relationship to time through work at archaeological and geological sites. By the mid-’90s, she began new media explorations of human technology and the environment by mining traumatic memory patterns and what they might uncover about geomorphologies in sites such as the San Andreas Fault. Her current exhibition Tesserae of Venus at Silverman Gallery in San Francisco imagines a world simultaneously on the verge of destruction and regeneration.



















