Rustin Larson's Blog, page 14
July 10, 2021
Summer Reading Recommendations 2021
Top ten book reviews based on readership of North of Oxford
A Little Excitement by Nancy Scott
https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/2021/04/01/a-little-excitement-by-nancy-scott/
Erotic by Alexis Rhone-Fancher
https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/2021/03/01/erotic-by-alexis-rhone-fancher/
Danish Northwest/Hygge Poems from the Outskirts by Peter Graarup Westergaard
Red Rover Red Rover by Bob Hicok
https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/2021/01/01/red-rover-red-rover-by-bob-hicok/
Razor Wire Wilderness by Stephanie Dickinson
https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/2021/05/01/razor-wire-wilderness-by-stephanie-dickinson/
American Quasar by David Campos / A Camera Obscura by Carl Marcum
The Likely World by Melanie Conroy-Goldman
https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/2021/02/01/the-likely-world-by-melanie-conroy-goldman/
Adjusting to the Lights – Poems by Tom C. Hunley
https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/2021/03/01/adjusting-to-the-lights-poems-by-tom-c-hunley/
The Philosopher Savant Crosses The River by Rustin Larson
Come-Hither Honeycomb by Erin Belieu
https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/2021/02/01/come-hither-honeycomb-by-erin-belieu/
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June 30, 2021
SPOTLIGHT: ANVILHEAD by Rustin Larson (an Excerpt)
I chose to avoid hardware stores because I knew those would be the first places they would go to preach in the hidden fascist meeting rooms in the back espousing their intergalactic fascism and bigotry. I picked a flower today, a tiger lily which were once thought unpatriotic though they bloom on the fourth of July.
I heard the lemon dealer scream at a passing car. Oh, those passing cars, their shouted insults and threats from cowardly passengers or drivers. They frequently focus their rage on the lemon dealer. I have also been a target of their jibes, but I only once heard distinctly, “I’m going to KILL you!” The lemon dealer seemed incensed. He ran into the street and bellowed and demanded they (driver and passenger) return and engage in combat. They squealed away and disappeared over our famous suicide train tracks.
It’s that time again with neighbors launching…
View original post 977 more words
June 29, 2021
June 17, 2021
Praise for Red Wing, stories by Rustin Larson
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/red-wing-rustin-larson/1139454159Red Wing! Some praise (and some refreshing honest criticism) about my new story collection:
Hi Rustin — I read your book, and thoroughly enjoyed. I did get lost in “Five Stories,” and a few other places where I think your love of the absurd may take you too far.
Where your more “traditional,” if still whimsical, self prevails, the stories are beautiful. I think you’ve made your mark as a writer of the Iowa landscape, particularly in winter, and small town life. These stories heavily affected by place are so memorable and poignant, plus often funny too.
Congratulations, my friend, on writing so well in what I assume is a new genre for you. I’ve never been able to write fiction,
though I’ve tried. My few tries sound nervous. (!)
Onward! and cheers, Suzanne
*
Rustin,
I’m enjoying the stories. I especially have liked “Pearl Harbor,” “The Incomplete History of The Village Of Orilla,” “Lola, and “Road Trip.”I love the sense of place throughout the collection. Can really feel the landscape. The evoking with sensual images is also strong, as well as the use of dialogue.I have a few stories left to read. Hope to get to them before the weekend.
Congratulations!
Stay safe and healthy.
Michael
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/red-wing-rustin-larson/1139454159?ean=9781666286540
June 10, 2021
Review of Lost Letters and Windfalls by Nynke Passi
Review of Rustin Larson’s Lost Letters and Windfalls
The world of Rustin Larson’s Lost Letters and Windfalls is populated with the ordinary and the ecstatic. Among cornfields, junkyards, and a Dairy Queen an eclectic cast of characters marches across a rural stage: an old woman small “like a burlap bag / full of nylons,” angels, finches, family members, the wind, the muse, and a young girl in a Degas painting.
The poet asserts: “The light falls upon all things. I have/ my memory of you—quiet as a/ picture frame among all these broken houses.” In poem after poem, Larson distills to the essence, painting tableaux firmly cast in time yet strangely eternal. Even the elements and houses have temperaments: “A violent emptiness is / the wind, and it can pick up whole / houses, if it wants, piling them like / crumpled egg shells in an open field.” Or: “The old house is crumbling from sympathy.”
While things fall apart, they are also restored and put back together. Somewhere along the way, all things turn a bit holy: “But here’s what we are: each man, each woman, / each neuter object, a church.” There is an unmistakable imagist quiet at the heart of the universe: “We can choose / to stand outside ourselves if we wish, the snow falling.”
“Listen,” Larson urges, “the world / begins in a moment.” The moment is painterly, vivid. The poet trusts only his “sense of touch.” Each poem etches a picture onto our retinas. Nothing much happens while the movement of life is also momentous. A daughter’s birth is announced like a “little beacon / pulse on the sonogram” and a father-in-law’s death is marked by his children sitting “in the room” and speaking “softly to the afternoon.” Every moment turns nearly breathless.
The universe of Larson’s poems exudes a warmth where “planets are “fishing / for us, wanting / us.” “The moon is the friend of the earth / and the earth of the sun.” This is a book of small tendernesses and lightning bolts that you will remember for a long time.
May 30, 2021
RED WING — Barnes and Noble
Thanks to the following journals which originally published some of these stories:Wapsipinicon Almanac: “Red Wing,” “Lola,” “The Third King,” “Jules”
Delmarva Review: “Einstein”
Tower Journal: “God, Snow, and the Reverend Huhok”
The Iowa Source: “Pizza Buffet,” “Five Stories,” “Yellow Impala,” “The Incomplete History of the Village of Orilla”
“The Incomplete History of the Village of Orilla” also appeared in the short story collection Mental.
Rustin Larson’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, and North American Review. He won 1st Editor’s Prize from Rhino and was a prize winner in The National Poet Hunt and The Chester H. Jones Foundation contests. A graduate of the Vermont College MFA in Writing, Larson was an Iowa Poet at The Des Moines National Poetry Festival, and a featured poet at the Poetry at Round Top Festival.
He is a poetry professor at Maharishi University, a writing instructor at Kirkwood Community College, and has also been a writing instructor at Indian Hills Community College.
Among his published books are Library Rain, Conestoga Zen Press, 2019 which was named a February 2019 Exemplar by Grace Cavalieri and reviewed in The Washington Independent Review of Books; Howling Enigma, Conestoga Zen Press, 2018; Pavement, Blue Light Press, 2017; The Philosopher Savant, Glass Lyre Press, 2015; Bum Cantos, Winter Jazz, & The Collected Discography of Morning, Blue Light Press, 2013; The Wine-Dark House, Blue Light Press, 2009; and Crazy Star, Loess Hills Books, 2005.
His honors and awards also include Pushcart Prize Nominee (seven times, 1988-2010); featured writer, DMACC Celebration of the Literary Arts, 2007, 2008; and finalist, New England Review Narrative Poetry Competition, 1985.
May 25, 2021
Flower Mountain – Amazon.com
Poems in this book have appeared previously in these journals: Briar Cliff Review, Chiron Review, Conch.es, Evening Street Review, Exit 13, Illya’s Honey, The Iowa Source, Lyrical Iowa, Metafore, Puerto Del Sol, Soundings East, 3rd Wednesday, Delmarva Review, North of Oxford, Weather EyeAbout the Author: Rustin Larson’s fiction has appeared in Delmarva Review, Wapsipinicon Almanac, Tower Journal, and The Iowa Source. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Iowa Review, North American Review, The Penn Review and Poetry East. He is the author of Bum Cantos (Blue Light Press), The Philosopher Savant (Glass Lyre Press) and Pavement, winner of the Blue Light Poetry Prize for 2016. Praise for Rustin Larson In The Philosopher Savant Crosses the River, Rustin Larson now winds his words several notches closer to a phantom sense of the certainties we once thought we could assume – the way life promised a few solid things, perhaps the purpose of life, which now seems sold door to door as an abrupt change, if anything. Words in their ordinary sense have been released from those customary connections, and often seem spoken from a place of floating far below meaning’s surface, as if a sedimentia abounding in the reasoning of tea leaves or some other structure of correspondence beyond our normal grasp were sending messages to the surface of the page. And yet we are inclined to wholly accept their truths, given who the sayer is. Even adrift on this raft of free-floating words, the voice, the tone, the presence of Rustin Larson is moored in every line – the dark humor, the human suffering and human song, the impingement of childhood memories, the direct gaze at the sane absurdity of the world, have only gained ground. Philip Glass articulates / our brains in music, he says, and with a craft of impeccable syntax that holds onto the same roots as Bishop’s or Larkin’s, he, too, articulates those deeply patterned structures that give us hope and keep us here, reading on. – Audrey Bohanan
May 23, 2021
To See the Bonnards – Barnes and Noble Press
Some poems here previously appeared in: Aeolian Harp, The Briar Cliff Review, Collateral Damage, California Quarterly, Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace, COG, The Daily Palette, The Dryland Fish, In residence, The Iowa Source, JuJubes, Kentucky Review, Lascaux Review, Lyrical Iowa, The MacGuffin, Pirene’s Fountain, Poetry East, Poets/Artists, Section 8, Verse Daily. Many thanks to the editors of these journals. __ATA.cmd.push(function() { __ATA.initDynamicSlot({ id: 'atatags-26942-60aa9433925eb', location: 120, formFactor: '001', label: { text: 'Advertisements', }, creative: { reportAd: { text: 'Report this ad', }, privacySettings: { text: 'Privacy', } } }); });
