“One Track Mind” features a Washtenaw County artist or band discussing one song from their latest release.

Standout Track: No. 6, “Amaretto,” from Fearless Amaretto (they/them). The Ypsilanti artist’s latest EP, Diary of Amaretto, is an exploration of passion, intimacy, and authenticity in relationships. Each song is like a personal journey entry, examining Fearless Amaretto’s thoughts and feelings about different romantic encounters.

On “Amaretto,” they’re educating potential suitors about how to approach them. “Navigating sex and relationships as a witch, or even as an intuitive or empathetic person, is always interesting," Amaretto said. "I’m often presented with suitors who talk a big game with no follow-through, or have feelings they want to explore with me, but are afraid to speak up. ‘Amaretto’ is that song to let them know to shit or get off the pot. Either make a move or move aside, because someone is waiting for their chance. You are that witch! I hope people hear this song and are reminded that they are not only desired, but they’re also deserving of people who won’t play about their desire for you. Tell them not to call your name unless they’re about that life.”

During an intro to playwriting class at Michigan State University seven years ago, Cole Hunter Dzubak found inspiration for his first play, Afterall, in an unlikely source: Oasis’ 1995 megahit "Wonderwall."

Given a prompt from his professor to write a play based on an existing piece of media, Dzubak said he ran with the idea of deconstructing what have become different interpretations of the song, repurposing them in his own story.

Originally believed to be a story about songwriter Noel Gallagher’s then-girlfriend and future wife, Gallagher later corrected the record that "Wonderwall" was actually a song about an imaginary friend “who's gonna come and save you from yourself."

Dzubak’s obsession with the song and its two supposed meanings made him realize what he had to do.

“Afterall is really about that idea of those two interpretations of the song kind of being pitted against one another, and it forces the main character to pick: imaginary friends or love of his life,” Dzubak said.

After years of tinkering, Dzubak and Ypsilanti’s Neighborhood Theatre Group will debut Afterall as its latest production, with shows set for February 27 through March 1 and March 6-8 at the Back Office Studio in Ypsilanti.

The Mythic Chaos: 50 Years of Destroy All Monsters exhibit at Cranbrook Art Museum focuses much of its energy on the visual art side of the Ann Arbor-formed collective, particularly the early years with original members Cary Loren, Niagara, Jim Shaw, and Mike Kelley.

But as Frank Uhle's Pulp story, "Collecting 'Chaos'," notes, there were several editions of Destroy All Monsters (DAM) on the music side, with Benjamin and Laurence Miller passing through the band as well as Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton and MC5 bassist Michael Davis.

A 1994 CD box set, 1974-1976, co-compiled by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, features Destroy All Monsters' early experimental recordings. But for many people, the musical style most associated with DAM can be heard on the proto- and avant-punk singles and live recordings starting in 1977, which are centered on Asheton's jackhammer guitar and Niagara's angry-goddess vocals.

DAM's first official record was 1979's "Bored," written by Niagara and Asheton, with Davis on bass, Rob King on drums, Laurence Miller on guitar, and Benjamin Miller on sax. The B-side, "You're Gonna Die," was co-written by Loren, but he had left the band by the time of the recording.

The Niagara and Asheton-led version of DAM recorded three additional singles, which have been compiled several times with the "Bored" 7-inch, and there's a slew of rough-and-ready live recordings out there featuring a lot of Stooges songs in the setlist. The core duo then morphed into Dark Carnival, sticking with roughly the same sound and setlists as DAM before calling it a day in 1998.

Below is a selection of 1977 and beyond recordings by Destroy All Monsters, from Asheton and Niagara-led live shows in Ann Arbor to the original version of DAM reuniting for concerts in California and Japan in the mid-1990s.

Flames, with all their energy and implications, burn through Kelly Hoffer’s new poetry collection, Fire Series. In the way that fire reconfigures the landscape, the poet shares, “I am constant in my remaking, making / my memory in my own image.”

What is there to remake? Hoffer’s poems reply that anything can be vulnerable: grief, one’s mind, rooms, a body, words. The poem “Firebreak” looks for some stability that is not there and inquires, “how do you protect a body from language, / be it poison or polish or pith?” There does not seem to be a way to find immunity from the ever-present flame, tangible or metaphysical, because when “I open / my chest to the weather” the poet finds things like “sentimental white-hot pining.”

As in her previous book, Undershore, Hoffer continues to engage with form in Fire Series. In the poem “chemical lace / day series,” she offers the same poem twice, the first spanning several pages and the second repeated but with select words and letters grayed out to form a lace-like new poem from the remaining text. Several poems take a repeated Bible verse, Genesis 3:24, and give it the erasure treatment as well, though again, none of the words are fully gone, only grayed out. These poems bring a literal “remaking” while finding new meanings and outlooks.

Poems in Fire Series spark with the sensuality brought by the heat of the blaze, with titles like “Pluming” and “the faces of a diamond.” The poem “Field holiday” concludes:

Kameryn Alexa Carter is an MFA student in the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan and the co-editor of Emergent Literary. Her new book of poetry is "Antediluvian," which follows 2025's "New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh," which is about Erykah Badu's 2008 album.

We're publishing Carter's poem "Whoso list to hunt" from "Antediluvian," and below it she answered a few questions about her work.

Tracy Zeman teaches writing at the University of Michigan and literature in U-M’s remote New England Literature Program. Originally from Illinois, Zeman currently lives outside Detroit with her husband, daughter, and dog, where she hikes and bird watches in all seasons. Her new book of poetry is called "Interglacial." 

We're publishing Zeman's poem "Belle Isle" from "Interglacial," and below it she answered a few questions about her work.

An older nun’s hard “certainty” pushes against a popular, easy-going priest in John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Doubt, A Parable.

When the play was first staged in 2004, it drew on the sexual scandals in the Catholic church and the very real doubts about the line between compassion and transgression.

PTD Productions is staging Doubt, A Parable Feb. 13-15 and 18-21 at the Riverside Arts Center in Ypsilanti.

The play opens with Father Flynn presenting his Sunday homily to the congregation. His theme is doubt, and like Jesus, he uses parables to make abstract ideas easy to understand.

“Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty,” he tells his congregation.

Director Josiah Jackson writes in his director’s note of the play's theme, “It’s a story much simpler and smaller than our real world, a fictional place where one could find certainty, wrapped in a nice package with a crisp bow on top, but that is not what this story does. Instead of offering certainty, this play asks us to consider that doubt is, in fact, not something to run from, but rather to embrace.”

The Radar tracks new music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This week:
Winged Wheel, Marcus Elliot, Michael Skib, Dennis Proctor, Mordake, Deluxe Batons, Kelsey., Othercast, Colin Stetson, Mei Semones, and PRISM Quartet.

Lillian Li’s new novel, Bad Asians, tracks a group of close friends during their formative years and through their choices as they navigate early adulthood—and the large and small consequences of those choices. Grace, who is on the fringes of the group, may see the core four friends for who they are, but does she really know them? Do they really know each other?

Li, who is originally from the D.C. metro area and lives in Ann Arbor, will celebrate the release of Bad Asians in the Michigan Union’s Rogel Ballroom on Tuesday, February 17, at 7 pm, presented by Literati.

The friends—Errol, Vivian, Diana, and Justin, plus Grace—meet as kids in the '90s and all live in the same vicinity, as illustrated by a map of their homes with a character list at the start of the book. Grace always seems to be one-upping them, which creates distance and jealousy owing, in part, to the high expectations of their Chinese American parents. External forces, like the lack of employment prospects from the financial crisis in the late aughts and the internet’s growing reign, affect their lives more than they could have anticipated.

After moving back in with their parents following college, what is there to do but make a video?

When Grace, passionate about film, talks them into starring in her documentary, the four friends agree and participate in interviews, but they reveal more than they had intended. As the eponymous documentary, Bad Asians, starts to haunt them, each character must decide how to respond.

The friends are hyper-aware of how they are perceived in the documentary. As Errol says in the film, “Maybe I’m a bad Asian, but I think there’s more to life than giving your parents something to brag about.” What constitutes “more to life” is something all of them have to seek for themselves. Amidst drugs, heartbreak, career challenges, and more, the characters must find a way forward, and whether that will mean staying connected with each other is a question only they can answer.

Li and I caught up about her new book, Bad Asians. We had a Q&A interview about her writing process, the internet, the characters, the features of the novel, and what Li is reading and writing next.

Mark Braun is ready to celebrate his birthday.

Known musically as “Mr. B,” the blues and boogie-woogie pianist turns 69 this month and is celebrating his big day with a February 13 show at Kerrytown Concert House.

Billed as “Mr. B’s Annual Birthday Bounce,” the show will feature a collaboration with drummer Ali Jackson. It also marks another milestone in Braun’s recovery from three recent hand surgeries.

“I hurt myself about a year ago pretty badly and had emergency surgery on one of my hands,” said Braun, who lives in Ann Arbor.

“And that recovery has gone as well as can be expected. It will never be exactly the same again, but I’m in pretty good shape. And then just lifelong overuse of my hands required more recent surgeries for carpal tunnel and trigger finger releases … and that has led into the wintertime.”