James Cihlar's Blog

Many thanks to Claude Peck for his review in GLR!

“These poems have chunks of John Ashbery-like inscrutability and pinches of the movie-crazed Frank O’Hara. . . .The second half of the book consists of poems under titles of movies starring Stanwyck. Wonderfully witty as viewing companions, they function on other levels, too. . . . Employing first-, second-, and third-person pronouns, Cihlar twines intriguingly into and out of movies, probing them for pathos and comedy, opposites and doubles. Cihlar convinces us that we want our screen idols to bestow us with emotional takeaways, however fleeting or mysterious. . . . It’s fun when Cihlar unleashes his unguarded fanboy, as in ‘The Furies’: ‘When Stanwyck casts aside pearls/ for diamonds, it changes the air/ in the theater. When she rides her horse/ to the squatter’s fort/ and warns her Mexican lover/ she wrings the neck of eloquence.’ Pop culture meets pathos in The Shadowgraph, a stirring paean to movie idols who flicker across the screen and sometimes show up in the mirror.”

—Claude Peck, “The Stanwyck Mystique,” The Gay & Lesbian Review, July/August 2020

I'm excited to have this new poem published in Lambda Literary Review:

http://www.lambdaliterary.org/feature...

It is included in my forthcoming book The Shadowgraph, from the University of New Mexico Press.

I have a new chapbook coming out this month! It's a fine-art letterpress edition collecting the list poems I've been writing over the years, old and new, called "What My Family Used." Check out Artichoke Press's site for more details: http://www.georgiaagreeley-artichokep...

Rancho Nostalgia is available on amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1935...

I'm excited to be included in this new anthology from Holy Cow! Press: http://www.startribune.com/entertainm...

Check out my essay on Tom Bartek's sculptures in the new issue of The Museum of Americana:

http://themuseumofamericana.wordpress...

Happy to have won the Bloom Poetry Chapbook competition for 2012. A Conversation with My Imaginary Daughter to be published by Bloom Literary Journal in 2013.

I won an "e-chapbook" competition--here's the result, "A City Full of Eyes" from Wordrunner press: www.echapbook.com/poems/cihlar

Here's a link to three new poems, all of them forthcoming in my next book, RANCHO NOSTALGIA:

http://www.ucityreview.com/4_Cihlar_J...

My interview with the talented and insightful Paul Lisicky is in the Superstition Review:

http://superstitionreview.asu.edu/n9/...