THE BLUE RENTAL, Barbara Mor's fierce, fiercely engaged, and fiercely engaging volume of prose pieces, appeared back in 2011. If you happened to miss the book then, you can still make good by buying it now, via Oliver, Amazon, alibris, or via order from any bookstore.

But there's other good news about Mor's work: It is beginning to receive the serious attention it deserves.

Read, for one example, the long piece by Edward Garcia in The Los Angeles Review of Books entitled "Barbara Mor's The Blue Rental: Rooms Outside Hollywood, Hell, USA."

Garcia does a superb job of introducing readers to the significance of Mor's work, the impassioned rigors of her life, and the unflagging intensity of her poetic voice as she looks straight at the agonies of our world's endgame, never flinching .

Here is Garcia's first paragraph:

"IT'S IMPORTANT TO ME that you write," James Dean said to 19-year old Barbara Mor when he dropped her off at her boardinghouse on Franklin and Beachwood. They had dined at the famous Villa Capri on McCadden Place, where Mor remembers Dean "referenced 'that Frenchman's poem' & then recited 'barbare... barbare... barbare...' just that word 3 times." Rimbaud's poem describes the bleeding flesh and the fires that underlie the fanfare of heroism and mythology. It was a prescient poem to invoke. Six days later Dean was killed in an auto accident on his way to Salinas, giving rise to one of Hollywood's greatest myths, and Mor was left at the beginning of a life disarticulating the "nauseous allegories" of America, picking apart the bleeding flesh and conflagrations that underlie our national fanfare.

Beyond the wonder of Garcia's excellent piece itself, another gift has been added: You can actually listen to the voice of Barbara Mor herself as she reads from The Blue Rental. Click either on the sound-link on the LARB page, or, if you'd rather, click here for the same thing via SoundCloud.

With your own copy of The Blue Rental at hand, you can also follow along as the author reads: She begins five lines from the bottom of page 89 and continues to the bottom of page 90 and the conclusion of the piece entitled "Linguistic Duplex." You won't, ever, forget what you've heard.