Mick Parsons (born 1973) is an American poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, and journalist. He is the author of six books. Three of them are Dead Machine E/Ditions: In The Great World (small) (his first novel),Conversations with Carlo (a collection of poetry), and The Greyhound Quarto (a small piece of non-fiction). The other three: Living Broke: Short Stories, and two collections of poetry, Lines from Another Book of Common Prayer and Fragments of Unidentifiable Form were published by Publish America. His work has been featured on semantikon.com and has appeared in The Dispatch Litareview, The American Mythville Review, The Smoking Poet, and Antique Children.
These days he's traveling America on the cheap and writing about it at americanrevisionary.com.
He has been a teacher, a factory worker, a file clerk, a small press publisher (The One Legged Cow Press), a freelance journalist, and a lifelong layabout.
Works
Fiction
In The Great World (small) (2010)
This debut novel, published exclusively as an e-book, is written in a series of interconnected episodes. Written in first person from the point of view of an unnamed young man in his mid-20s, the novel is an exploration of the American Dream in the 21st. The narrator is unapologetic, rude, lazy, occasionally noble, generally a coward, and always his own worst enemy. He’s somehow managed to create a comfortable – if shaky – bubble of comfort in Phoenix after being displaced by Hurricane Katrina. He lives in a cheap motel; he hangs out at the MTP Sports Bar and Grill – when he has money – and drinks in his room when he doesn’t. He scrapes by on day labor and a short-term work ethic. He’s got no interest in regular work, going back to college, doing anything, or maintaining a relationship.
Through him we meet other people who are just as broken, though less aware of their situation, and we view the world the narrator lives in: a post 9/11 two-dimensional world without morality or ethics, where people get screwed over whether they do the right thing or not; a world of drug dealers, abused wives, manipulated boy toys, bookies, hookers, crooked cops, and a cocaine-addled bar owner. All of them are, like the narrator, just looking for some kind of shaky comfort in the world; and, just like the narrator, unable to find it.
Living Broke: Short Stories (2010)
These stories are a collection of darkly humorous, visceral, and honest images of life in America since the turn of the century. The characters are all trying to survive and get by in spite of living in a world where there is never enough, where hard work is not rewarded the way we are always told it will be, and where the divisions between the Haves and Have Nots are increasingly obvious. These are the In-Between People - the people who believed in the Middle Class American Dream and who have found it failing, but have nothing tangible to replace it with. The victories expressed are small and short lived, while the overarching machinations - institution, ambition, greed, loneliness, and isolation - are constants.
Poetry
Conversation With Carlo (2010)
These poems, written over the first year or so of his time in Arizona and published exclusively as an e-book, are at once sad, funny, geographic, and myopic. But like all good poetry, they work to move themselves and the reader outside themselves and into a larger conversation in which words may be the most overrated commodity.
Lines From Another Book of Common Prayer (2007)
The poems in this second collection, published by POD publisher Publish America, explore the interior landscapes of the spiritual, the spectacular, and the everyday cityscapes and countryside that make us who we are, and from which we are ultimately unable to really escape. For Parsons, the only option is acceptance and the hope that transcendence is still possible in this day and age.
Fragments of Unidentifiable Form (2006)
In this, his first published collection of poems, Parsons ties the internal geography of everyday life with the machinations of the outside world. By exploring the connections between these two seemingly isolated landscapes, the poems in this collection seek to outline a new geography—another continent to explore in a world that seems to be depleted, overworked, and left behind.
Non-fiction/essays
The Greyhound Quarto(2010)
Travel Writing for the real life traveler. Traveling across the country on a Greyhound bus, Mick Parsons talks about traveling the way you don't get it on the Travel Channel. Satirical, poetic, and insightful, this four piece essay will bring parts of America into focus that most people don't see.
Dan Simmons is an American science fiction and horror writer. He is the author of the Hyperion Cantos and the Ilium/Olympos cycles, among other works which span the science fiction, horror, and fantasy genres, sometimes within a single novel. Simmons's genre-intermingling Song of Kali (1985) won the World Fantasy Award. He also writes mysteries and thrillers, some of which feature the continuing character Joe Kurtz.
Gary Snyder is an American poet, essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. His early poetry has been associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance and he has been described as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology". Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the American Book Award. His work, in his various roles, reflects an immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. He has translated literature into English from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese. For many years, Snyder was an academic at the University of California, Davis and for a time served as a member of the California Arts Council.
Paul Laurence Dunbar was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in Dayton, Ohio, to parents who had been enslaved in Kentucky before the American Civil War, Dunbar began writing stories and verse when he was a child. He published his first poems at the age of 16 in a Dayton newspaper, and served as president of his high school's literary society.
William Carlos Williams was an American poet, writer, and physician closely associated with modernism and imagism.
Henry Charles Bukowski was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic ambience of his adopted home city of Los Angeles. Bukowski's work addresses the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work. The FBI kept a file on him as a result of his column Notes of a Dirty Old Man in the LA underground newspaper Open City.
Daphne Marlatt, born Buckle, CM, is a Canadian poet and novelist who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Festus Claudius "Claude" McKay OJ was a Jamaican-American writer and poet. He was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance.
Stella Dorothea Gibbons was an English writer, journalist, and poet. She established her reputation with her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932) which has been reprinted many times. Although she was active as a writer for half a century, none of her later 22 novels or other literary works—which included a sequel to Cold Comfort Farm—achieved the same critical or popular success. Much of her work was long out of print before a modest revival in the 21st century.
"Gerontion" is a poem by T. S. Eliot that was first published in 1920 in Ara Vos Prec and Poems. The title is Greek for "little old man," and the poem is a dramatic monologue relating the opinions and impressions of an elderly man, which describes Europe after World War I through the eyes of a man who has lived most of his life in the 19th century. Two years after it was published, Eliot considered including the poem as a preface to The Waste Land, but was talked out of this by Ezra Pound. Along with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and The Waste Land, and other works published by Eliot in the early part of his career, '"Gerontion" discusses themes of religion, sexuality, and other general topics of modernist poetry.
James Harrison was an American poet, novelist, and essayist. He was a prolific and versatile writer publishing over three dozen books in several genres including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, children’s literature, and memoir. He wrote screenplays, book reviews, literary criticism, and published essays on food, travel, and sport. Harrison indicated that, of all his writing, his poetry meant the most to him.
Sherman Joseph Alexie Jr. is a Spokane-Coeur d'Alene-Native American novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter, and filmmaker. His writings draw on his experiences as an Indigenous American with ancestry from several tribes. He grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation and now lives in Seattle, Washington.
Tom Leonard was a Scottish poet, writer and critic. He was best known for his poems written in Glaswegian dialect, particularly his Six Glasgow Poems and The Six O'Clock News. His work frequently dealt with the relationship between language, class and culture.
Harry Mathews was an American writer, the author of various novels, volumes of poetry and short fiction, and essays. Mathews was also a translator of the French language.
"Mending Wall" is a poem by the twentieth-century American poet Robert Frost (1874–1963). It opens Robert's second collection of poetry, North of Boston, published in 1914 by David Nutt, and it has become "one of the most anthologized and analyzed poems in modern literature".
Howl and Other Poems is a collection of poetry by Allen Ginsberg published November 1, 1956. It contains Ginsberg's most famous poem, "Howl", which is considered to be one of the principal works of the Beat Generation as well as "A Supermarket in California", "Transcription of Organ Music", "Sunflower Sutra", "America", "In the Baggage Room at Greyhound", and some of his earlier works. For printing the collection, the publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, another well-known poet, was arrested and charged with obscenity. On October 3, 1957, Judge Clayton W. Horn found Ferlinghetti not guilty of the obscenity charge, and 5,000 more copies of the text were printed to meet the public demand, which had risen in response to the publicity surrounding the trial. "Howl and Other Poems" contains two of the most well-known poems from the Beat Generation, "Howl" and "A Supermarket in California", which have been reprinted in other collections, including the Norton Anthology of American Literature.
James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. One of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that "the Negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue."
Croatian literature refers to literary works attributed to the medieval and modern culture of the Croats, Croatia, and Croatian. Besides the modern language whose shape and orthography was standardized in the late 19th century, it also covers the oldest works produced within the modern borders of Croatia, written in Church Slavonic and Medieval Latin, as well as vernacular works written in Čakavian and Kajkavian dialects.
Telephone Poles is the second book of poetry written by American writer John Updike.
The idea of a fourth dimension has been a factor in the evolution of modern art, but use of concepts relating to higher dimensions has been little discussed by academics in the literary world. From the late 19th century onwards, many writers began to make use of possibilities opened up by the exploration of such concepts as hypercube geometry. While many writers took the fourth dimension to be one of time, others preferred to think of it in spatial terms, and some associated the new mathematics with wider changes in modern culture.
How to Walk Away is a 2015 novel and the debut novel of Australian novelist Lisa Birman. The work was first published on 1 February 2015 in the United States by Spuyten Duyvil Press. The novel centers on veteran Otis and his wife Cat, a genealogist. How to Walk Away is an exploration of post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive compulsion, body integrity disorder, and the grief of keeping secrets born in war.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
