Commentary |
on My Men, a novel by Victoria Kielland, translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls
“Kielland’s main interest is in imagining the psychological struggle that Belle Gunness, the first female serial killer recorded in US history, may have endured.”
Commentary |
on Live In Suspense, poetry by David Groff
“… the traumatic echoes of the AIDS crisis and the double consciousness of the speaker, who experienced it as a lethal reality that still resonates within him even as it becomes historical for others.”
Commentary |
on Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality From Camp Meeting to Wall Street by Jackson Lears
“Lears’ goal is to pin down the biography of a single complex idea, resurrected by John Maynard Keynes’ realization ‘that the key to investor confidence is the presence of animal spirits — the spontaneous urge to action,’ also known as life force.”
Commentary |
on Dreaming the Mountain, poems by Tuệ Sỹ, translated from the Vietnamese by Nguyen Ba Ching and Martha Collins
“For Tuệ Sỹ every river is both its surface and its depth, its present and its past, and every life is a blink of lightning or, maybe more precisely, a dream.”
Commentary |
on Calligraphies, poems by Marilyn Hacker & Collected Poems by Ellen Bryant Voigt
“Although the pair differ from one another in their concerns and methods, they share a durable — and sometimes quirky — mastery of prosody that is unmatched in contemporary verse.”
Commentary |
on Austral, a novel by Carlos Fonseca, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell
“Fonseca is telling us we are losing the world, our worlds, and in the process, our ability to remember and honor our past. But as he has said, ‘I think that in a world obsessed with endings, literature must provide the path for new futures.'”
Commentary |
on Second Star and other reasons for lingering, lyric prose by Philippe Delerm, translated from the French by Jody Gladding
“Delerm packs big ideas into small packages … intelligent observations and terse judgments laden with wit.”
Commentary |
on Feast, poems by Ina Cariño
“The poem becomes an argument that one study of the body be informed by another, that our language and the memories we index might offer a way forward.”
Commentary |
on Excursive, poems by Elizabeth Robinson
“… a poetry of witness that is also meditative, imbued with spirit — and sometimes great wit. She understands that nothing stays, that words multiply their meanings.”
Commentary |
on The Last Songbird, a novel by Daniel Weizmann
“Before you know it, what began as an ordinary run-out written in a pedestrian style soon shows flashes of street-level lyricism and incisiveness.”
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.”