Last week, poet and activist Dustin Brookshire recommended Denise Duhamel’s work to FWR readers, and I failed to mention that Dustin has a poetry blog of his own, one bearing what may be the best name ever: I was Born Doing Reference Work in Sin. This month he’s featuring a very cool series with guest [...]

Monster-killing does not have to be a hypersigil; it’s more basic than that. The organizing moral principles of a game world often boil down to something desperately obvious: black-and-white, good and evil. This isn’t bad in itself because a good game, like a good book, then takes the player into a more familiar ambiguity. Good and bad become less easily separated and less relevant the longer you travel. The trick is to create, in the gamer, a commitment to a point of view, whatever its morality…

Dustin Brookshire wrote in to recommend two books by Denise Duhamel, Kinky (Orchises Press, 1997) and Ka-Ching! (Pittsburgh, 2009). Her other titles include Two and Two (Pittsburgh, 2005)–winner of Binghamton University’s Milt Kessler Book Award, Mille et un Sentiments (Firewheel, 2005), Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001), and The Star-Spangled Banner [...]