Sun Yung Shin’s second poetry collection, “Rough, and Savage” from Coffeehouse Press, is simultaneously alluring and caustic, lovely and mournful, ambitious in both its moral ambition and literary invention. Shin’s poems deal in pain and love and alienation, but she weaves those well-worn themes into something fresh, a contemporary fairy tale in verse about the […]
Article · October 15, 2012 by Susannah Schouweiler
The 12th annual “Rain Taxi” Twin Cities Book Festival is Saturday, October 13 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Progress Center at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds in St. Paul. For twelve years, “Rain Taxi Review of Books” has hosted the Twin Cities Book Festival. It’s the literary event of the season in these […]
Article · October 10, 2012 by Susannah Schouweiler
There’s something immediately disarming about a diorama — engagement comes so naturally. You have lean in, maybe even pick up a magnifying glass, to see all the detail properly; it’s impossible to remain aloof and passive when you look one over. And seen up close, a diorama offers a distinctly nostalgic, familiar pleasure. The visual […]
Article · October 8, 2012 by Susannah Schouweiler
One thing that’s struck me, writing on the St. Paul beat for Knight Arts, is that “Twin” Cities or no, there really is something quite distinct about the arts and cultural scenes on the Capitol City side of the Mississippi River. Consider the visual arts: While we have a handful of notable independent exhibition spaces, […]
Article · October 3, 2012 by Susannah Schouweiler
Minnesota Opera, a Knight Arts grantee, celebrated the launch of its 50th-anniversary season with a spectacular iteration of Giuseppe Verdi’s seldom-staged third opera, “Nabucco,” comprised of four tableaux loosely rooted in the biblical tale of the Babylonian conquest of Judah – the sacking of Jerusalem and destruction of the Hebrew nation’s First Temple. Jason Howard […]
Article · October 1, 2012 by Susannah Schouweiler
When photographer and filmmaker Mike Hazard (a.k.a. “Media Mike”) moved to Lowertown in 1999, his new place was less than a block from the downtown St. Paul Farmer’s Market, so it was natural to incorporate a stop there into his routine. With all its townie charm, bustle and sheer vitality, he’s found documenting the market’s […]
Article · September 26, 2012 by Susannah Schouweiler
Park Square Theatre (a Knight Arts grantee) has opened its new season with John Logan’s 2010 Tony Award-winning play, “Red.” The story takes place in 1958, inside the close quarters of painter Mark Rothko’s Bronx studio. By this point, the abstract expressionist has come into his own: respected if not rich, in late middle age, […]
Article · September 24, 2012 by Susannah Schouweiler
Herbert Weber, “papierbaum oder der widerstand der dinge (papertree, or the resistance of things),” digital photograph, 2008. Courtesy of Bethel University and the artist Bethel University’s Olson Gallery is an airy, sunlit space situated on the second floor of the school’s student center; the exhibition space is one generous room fronted by a bank of […]
Article · September 19, 2012 by Susannah Schouweiler
If you’re in the mood for some thoughtful conversation on arts and letters, get out your calendars: There are three notable talks coming up this week you should make note of. Molly Ringwald makes her fiction debut with “When It Happens to You” a ‘novel in nine stories.’ Photo by Fergus Greer, courtesy of Common […]
Article · September 17, 2012 by Susannah Schouweiler
With the start of a new arts season, my inbox is just stuffed with press releases for festivals and public art projects, various and sundry launches and shows around town. With all that’s going on, don’t let this weekend’s Western Sculpture Park Festival pass you by. Western Sculpture Park’s annual festival is this Saturday, September […]
Article · September 12, 2012 by Susannah Schouweiler
When I moved to the Twin Cities, my first job here was as a bookseller at the Hungry Mind bookstore (later known as Ruminator Books) in St. Paul, where I worked for several years until it shuttered in 2004. Hungry Mind was one of those truly charmed bookshops, known — not just here in Minnesota, […]
Article · September 10, 2012 by Susannah Schouweiler