Commentary |
on The House on Via Gemito, a novel by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky
“… both a triumph of style and an indelible chronicle of a Naples in the throes of change. Starnone’s characters enter and exit with expert timing, impoverished, war-weary, but with chins held high.”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Osip Mandelstam, a biography by Ralph Dutli & Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth by Jennifer Banks
“Dutli notes how the poet ‘fills the bill of a legendary literary saint,’ but then qualifies that portrayal: ‘the persistent reduction of the poet’s life to a tale of martyrdom has led to a failure to recognize Mandelstam’s literary greatness.'”
Commentary |
on American Treasure, poems by Jill McDonough
“Evidence of our tragic defects may be found anywhere, even in McDonough’s own home, though her richest poems take place at sites of historical trauma.”
Commentary |
on Soldiers Don’t Go Mad, nonfiction by Charles Glass
“In the summer of 1917, a pair of British army officers and poets arrived at the Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinbergh. The hospital was designed to address cases of PTSD — or, as it was called then, neurasthenia or shell-shock.”
Commentary |
on Homeward From Heaven, a novel by Boris Poplavsky, translated from the Russian by Bryan Karetnyk
“I came to terms with the violence that the male subject does to himself by trying to measure up to an idealized version of masculinity. This novel may be read as a response and even a critique of the Surrealist treatment of masculinity.”
Commentary |
on The Age of Guilt: The Super-Ego in the Online World by Mark Edmundson
“His chief goal is to attach the super-ego and its turd-in-the-punchbowl qualities to the culture wars. The super-ego, he submits, is behind the worst of right and left politics.”
Commentary |
on Deal: New and Selected Poems by Randall Mann
“Mann is a poet of both place and displacement, but perhaps more accurately, he is a poet of landscape — of physical landscapes, but also cultural ones: queer life, the world of poetry, and language itself.”
Commentary |
on Soliloquy With the Ghosts in Nile, poems by Hussain Ahmed
“Ahmed’s poetry, while mourning the loss of names and those they held, also insists on speech that takes root in the spaces between losses.”
Commentary |
on Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnnets 1994-2022 by Henri Cole
“It’s this infinite receptivity to interpretation (or misinterpretation) that explains both the sonnet’s durability and flexibility throughout its existence, as well as the difficulty of defining it.”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Music Titles by Aiden Levy, Edward Dusinberre, Griel Marcus and William C. Banfield
“Patrice Rushen: ‘There was always R&B, and there was jazz, and there was gospel, and there were radio stations playing all of it, so that you got the idea that there was a palette of black music out there, as opposed to what we see now.’”
Commentary |
on Picasso the Foreigner: An Artist in France, 1900-1973 by Annie Cohen-Solal, translated from the French by Sam Taylor
“He was so disheartened by the French police and government that, in 1959, he rejected an offer to finally become a French citizen. Yet Pablo Picasso found his artistic expression and much more in France.”
Commentary |
on Still No Word From You: Notes in the Margin, essays by Peter Orner
“For Orner, reading is so intertwined with living that the projects of criticism and of memoir can’t be distinguished at all.”
Commentary |
on a “Working Life,” poems by Eileen Myles
“On the page or on the stage, Myles has an effortless and charismatic delivery, a feigned lack of affect that obscures a boiling surfeit of it.”
Commentary |
on I Went To See My Father, a novel by Kyung-Sook Shin, translated from the Korean by Anton Hur
“What begins as a family melodrama becomes a fascinating piece of historical fiction, portraying South Korean history in the 1930’s, the Japanese Occupation to follow, and the Korean War.”
Commentary |
The Perpetual Virtuosities of Alice Fulton: on Coloratura On A Silence Found in Many Expressive Systems
“… she ranges nimbly among operatic extravagance, virtuosic ornament, bedrock intelligence and technical chops … but also attends to the hidden, the blue, notes between notes, to what’s nearly obscured or in the margins.”