Commentary |
on Things in Nature Merely Grow, a memoir by Yiyun Li
“The most intense emotion she communicates is vexation — a recognition that she’s been shunted into an abyssal, inexplicable place, but is left with no choice but to press forward.”
Commentary |
on Mark Twain, a biography by Ron Chernow
“The scrappy Missouri boy assumed the protective coloring of his affluent in-laws and professional peers. His political views shifted from reactionary to progressive, conforming to values he’d found among New England’s WASPs.”
Commentary |
on My Heresies, poems by Alina Stefanescu
“My Heresies reminds one that the great devotional poets were rarely doctrinaire, that they often embraced themes that would trouble the conventionally pious.”
Commentary |
Book Notes: Nonfiction — on Love and Need by Adam Plunkett, Hypochondria by Will Rees & The Only Face by Herve Guibert
“If Guibert was reluctant and prudent about making photos, it was not because he found the medium itself to be corrupt, but rather because his eye was alert for signs of the transitory nature of his own life as a gay man.”
Commentary |
on Pink Dust, poems by Ron Padgett
“The collection’s most poignant drive is the drive of aging, the awareness of death, and a kind of rising calm and good humor in the face of it.”
Commentary |
on A Calligraphy of Days: Selected Poems by Krzysztof Siwczyk, translated from the Polish by Piotr Florczyk and Alice-Catherine Carls
“There are beginnings upon beginnings, a state of becoming that never takes itself for granted. The poems work by vigilant observation and the negotiation of the feeling that arises from such worldly evidence.”
Commentary |
on The Pulse of Contemporary Turkish, by Buğra Giritlioğlu and Daniel Scher
“The poets featured here are contemporaries of one another, their work often a result of shared sensibilities, politics, and aesthetics, a response to the work of 20th-century Turkish poets that came before them.”
Commentary |
on Wellwater, poems by Karen Solie
“A dual focus on extractive capitalism and nature’s increasing fragility, on the former’s slow violence against the latter and its respective citizenry, has been her artistic crucible since Short Haul Engine (2001).”
Commentary |
Book Notes: Novels — on Near Distance by Hannah Stoltenberg, The Holy Innocents by Miguel Delibes & Paris, So To Speak by Navid Kermani
“In Near Distance, there are subtle critiques of those who pursue ‘a greater truth than the one others lived by’ – an acidic appraisal of self-deception posing as social enlightenment.”
Commentary |
on Old Stranger, poems by Joan Larkin
“Larkin’s poetry, and her writing on recovery for the Hazelden Foundation, has often been concerned with naming silenced experiences and bringing them into the light.”
Commentary |
on Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe by Carl Zimmer
“The book’s most trenchant theme: science is shaped and driven by the political and cultural values of the individuals and institutions that fund investigations, whether private endowments or the federal government.”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Serendipity by Carol Mavor, A Woman I Once Knew by Rosalind Fox Solomon, Gliff by Ali Smith & Your Steps on the Stairs by Antonio Muñoz Molino
“Interactions, small gestures, and supposition attain sharp profiles in contrast to the dystopian surround. Rescuing language from its servile usages is Gliff’s essential occurrence.”
Commentary |
on Nevermore by Cécile Wajsbrot, translated from the French by Tess Lewis
“Nevermore is a … record of the act of translation as an all-consuming thought process … Wajsbrot could not have created such a complete account of a translator’s experience without having herself translated Woolf’s The Waves …”
Commentary |
on Flesh, a novel by David Szalay
“… a wise and haunting book that permits the reader to draw conclusions as it chronicles one man’s journey through the frequent trembles of life.”
Commentary |
Book Notes: Poetry — on Aurora Americana by Myronn Hardy, In The Glittering Maw by Joyce Mansour & Book of Exercises II by George Seferis
“The damaged thing, the life we all sustain and witness, may suffer in fragments, but Hardy proceeds fiercely, not tempted to illuminate the shards gaudily for the sake of a facile empathy.”