JILL BRECKENRIDGE’S CIVIL BLOOD, PUBLISHED IN 1986, CREATED QUITE A STIR. It was an important book regionally and nationally, a richly imagined, thoroughly researched evocation of the Civil War, through poems and prose, as experienced by General John Cabell Breckinridge and a cast of souls involved in that terrible conflict. Nodin Press has just released her new collection of poetry, The Gravity of…

TO BE ADULT IS TO KNOW BETTER. You are not going to get everything you want; you are not going to get an answer. You are special to someone, but not exactly in the way you wanted to be. You cannot go back, you cannot skip ahead. You will not be completely understood. There is no such thing as a perfect understanding — there is not even any constant quantity to understand. And yet — to be adult is to want…

ONCE UPON A TIME, OVER A THOUSAND YEARS AGO IN TANG DYNASTY CHINA, a scholar, bureaucrat, husband, and father abandoned the “dusty world” for the fog-wreathed Tien Tai Mountains. He took a cave for his home and begged for his daily bread at a monastery there. He carved poems on trees outside the mouth of his cave and painted verse on the rocks. The poet eventually assumed the name of the mountain where…

IT’S TIME AGAIN FOR THE ANNUAL SOIRÉE that theater people wait for with bated breath — the Ivey Awards celebrates its fifth anniversary on September 21 at the State Theatre. That’s no small feat for an event created by someone whose only previous connection to the theater community was as a ticket-buyer. The now-defunct Twin Cities awards show the Iveys most resemble — the Kudo Awards — barely made it…

THIS IS NOT A CRITICAL ARTICLE; it’s a call to action. Twin Cities  viewers will soon have a chance to check out one of the most exciting art projects in the country: the Combat Paper Project, created by a group of artists and led by Drew Cameron and Drew Matott, two master paper-makers and book artists, both of whom will be in residence at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts next week. I first…

HIP-HOP DANCE IS A COOL WORLD. Those sounding beats ground an explosive flow of movement, loosing and catching the dancer as she spins or pops or floats or flies. You see a stream of moments, crystal-clear as they pass, but there’s no reaching back to understand what just happened: restlessly virtuosic, hip-hop always hides the how. That virtuosity can take the form of unabashed shows of power or…

THE TROUBLE WITH BOOKS IS THEY MAKE YOU DO MAD, CRAZY THINGS. Take, for example, medieval lovers Francesca and Paolo. Secreted in a room, Francesca, the wife of Gianciotto Malatesta, and Paolo pored together over the romances of Lancelot and Guinevere. The passions bridled within the text were set loose as shoulder rubbed shoulder and eye met eye. As these platonic acquaintances read the passages…

THIS SATURDAY (10:30) OR SUNDAY (7:30) at Bedlam, go see smithsoniansmith (as is). First, you should see it because this is the first evening-length work from Hijack (the Minneapolis-based duo of Kristin Van Loon and Arwen Wilder) and Scott Heron (their New Orleans-based frequent collaborator). Second, while Hijack can be hard to track — a one-off performance here, a fifteen-minute snippet there — this…

RECENTLY, THE WORKS OF 32 NORTHLAND-AFFILIATED PRINTMAKERS, members of the Northern Printmakers Alliance, appeared in a show in the Bloomington Art Center. There were no reviews — arts journalism has fallen on hard times — but the show was highly visible in the busy 1960s-era building: its glass walls face municipal buildings, and the participants of the center’s dance and theater programs come and go…