New Mexico Mercury

¡COLORES! April 11, 2014

Spanish photographer Janire Najera discovers another side of New Mexico's nuclear history...

Friday Voyage: Petroglyph National Monument

One of the largest collection of ancient rock drawings in the world sits in Albuquerque's backyard.  Lightly visited, these testaments of prior cultures aren't without controversy. 

El Machete: BP Spills in Lake Michigan

BP Spills in Lake Michigan

A look back at ‘The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud’ by Henry Miller

Published at a time when many artists, if not world citizens, were trying to recover a little poetry in their war-ravaged lives, Henry Miller came out with this book about Arthur Rimbaud, the enigmatic French Symbolist poet who died in 1891 at thirty-seven. As a figure in culture, this poet and adventurer represented Henry’s life-long obsession, a book about the man who haunted him—in his psychic life and his work—and taunted him to see through the blunders of culture: to search his insides and live up to it—if he had the courage. This long essay on Rimbaud explores the depths of the great poet’s truncated life, and his even more stunted life in literature, and it’s clear Henry was always in awe of Arthur...

‘The Gin Game’ lights up Vista Grande

In the program notes for the East Mountain Center for Theatre’s terrific new production of The Gin Game at the Vista Grande Community Center, actor Tim Reardon comments that he is “of an age when there is likely more experiences behind me than in front.” The same is true of the two characters in this drama, Reardon’s Weller Martin and Georgia Athearn’s Fonsia Dorsey (as well as of this reviewer), which, as Reardon says, “brings a certain perspective"...

¡COLORES! April 4, 2014

New Mexico land artist Bill Gilbert shares his approach to creating art...

¡COLORES! March 28, 2014

Leaders in Albuquerque’s art community discuss how to keep the arts a vital part of our lives.

Weekly Poem: Archeology

We turned our backs & spit
out the medicine of salvation.
We let the sun melt us in a
sweet conspiracy of heat.

Liquefied, we seeped
under white, alkaline soil
& shrugged when wagon
train wheels rolled over us...

El Machete: Burque Protests

Burque Protests

Poetry That Tells Us Who We Are

With Our Eyes Wide Open: Poems of the New American Century, edited by Douglas Valentine, is just out from Albuquerque’s own West End Press. This handsome volume should be on the bookshelf of every poetry lover and everyone concerned with our global struggles, how the US is perceived throughout the world, and how conscious poets here are setting the record straight. Rather than keep the book on your bookshelf, enter it often. You will find plenty to make you whole...