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Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Amber Tamblyn's Dark Sparkler is My New Favorite Kind of Poetry

Moment of honesty.

Outside of Frank O'Hara, I'm not quite the biggest fan of poetry. It's not that I dislike all poetry ever, I just never got super into it. 

But when I received a galley copy of Amber Tamblyn's Dark Sparkler, I was immediately totally, absolutely in love.


Dark Sparkler is a collection of more than thirty poems as portraits of famous actresses who may have initially been stars on the red carpet but later fell far from the good kind of spotlight. Tamblyn's words pull you in to feel like you are deep in the minds of these women, however dark they may be.


Although the words are the skeleton of Dark Sparkler, Tamblyn's talent really shines in her curation of the collection as a whole. The book reminds me so much of the journals I've kept in the past; full of portions of a text, sketches, collage, print outs, etc. The pieces commissioned for Dark Sparkler vary from paintings to sketches to collages to comics, but there are no photographs. Just like Tamblyn's poetry, the artwork that accompanies her words isn't what we would expect to be paired with a series of profiles. Instead of portraits we would recognize, the original artwork woven into the pages of Dark Sparkler, reflects the inner thoughts and feelings of these starlets.





I wanted to share this from the foreword by Diane di Prima, which I found to be 100% true:
At some point you will begin to get curious. Something will start to tug at the edge of your mind/heart. At that point, go to the library or search the Internet for information about any girl/woman you find yourself thinking about... Read their (often sadly short) stories. Let your imagination fill in what book and computer don't say.
The collection is practically addicting. You really get lost in these pages and in the world of these women, researching them after reading Tamblyn's portraits.

Plus, Frank is in this book.


Learn more about Amber Tamblyn at Amtam.com, which is pretty good lookin' as far as actor sites go, and her poetry non-profit at WriteNowPoets.org.

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hey there, stranger!

I love my city.

the bus from Into the Wild, because I saw my friend Kristi this weekend!

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