From the Stacks: May 5, 2006

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Utne receives some 1,200 magazines, newsletters, journals, weeklies, and zines. Add in hundreds of books, CDs, and DVDs, and it's a flood of media that lines the walls of our library and piles high on our desks. All the ideas, people, and stories inspire lively daily chatter, but they can't all fit into our bimonthly magazine. So we share the gems here in our weekly editions of 'From the Stacks.' Check in every Friday for the freshest highlights of the independent and alternative media.

Signs of the Times, a slender volume of poetry by Bud Osborn and prints by Richard Tetrault, was published by Vancouver-based Anvil Press last year but we've just set eyes and hands on it. Regardless, it's a timeless marriage of ardent words in the tradition of Pablo Neruda and Walt Whitman, on behalf of those whose voices aren't often heard, with striking woodcuts and linocuts reminiscent of the works of Lynd Ward and Clifford Harper. Osborn's poems about the dehumanizing experience of being homeless in a city express a generic sense of outrage and compassion even as they describe specifically the lives of suffering junkies, prostitutes, and 'binners' in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. -- Chris Dodge

The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), based in Culver City, California, offers a museum; a land-use database; a litany of projects, programs, and publications; and, when they get around to it, a newsletter entitled The Lay of the Land. The wait is worth it. The newly arrived Winter 2006 issue is studded with more gems than a diamond mine in Africa. Focused on the US, the profiles in the issue leap around: one minute you're learning more than anyone should ever know about corn, and the next you're reading about an island of concrete in the Pacific that the federal government is thinking about selling. The entire time, however, you're realizing how complex and fascinating our relationship to land can be, and you keep reading. -- Nick Rose

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