Return of the Minister of Culture & Plastic Surgery (as Minister of Foreign Relations)

He’s back!

During the years 2105-2016 I avidly read the Dutch press and wider European coverage of the refugee influx. I wrote this article, “The Minister of Culture and Plastic Surgery” after the Dutch former minister of culture Halbe Zijlstra insisted at a press conference that refugees would be denied ”free cosmetic surgery bankrolled by the state” making no mention of any of the multiple wars that had raged on with Western complicity from the beginning of the end of Arab Spring. This year, former Minister of Culture and Plastic Surgery, Zijlstra was recently rechristened as the Dutch minister of foreign policy. https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/08/the-ministry-of-culture-and-plastic-surgery/   *It came as a suggestion from my friend Edward Geelhoed a Dutch journalist and  Athens-correspondent, to repost the piece after Zijlstra’s rehabilitation https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/08/the-ministry-of-culture-and-plastic-surgery/

link to poem in “Writers Resist”‘ November issue

‘How the first Strangers met the Coast Guard” my poem today in the weekly politics and lit digest ”Writers Resist!” (I changed the title, originally ”How the Gods in their Sun-Boat were first received by the Coast-Guard”) On Writers Resist: “Writers Resist is a literary collective born of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. We publish creative expressions of resistance by diverse writers and artists from around the globe”

How the first strangers met the coast guard

Mon Pays Ce Soir review reprint

Review I wrote of Côte D’Ivoire poet Josué Guébo’s collection ”My Country Tonight” Mon Pays Ce Soir, translated by Todd Fredson for Action Books. The review reappears in the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative’s blog after first appearing in the blog for Anomaly/ Anomalous Press / ex-Drunken Boat. Thanks to all the editors

https://glli-us.org/2017/11/14/between-the-naked-water-and-the-flower-of-the-iroko-a-book-review-of-my-country-tonight-by-josue-guebo/