Commentary |
on Walker Evans: Last Photographs & Life Stories by Michael Lesy
“Evans wasn’t trying to push the Polaroid into the realm of art photography so much as enjoy the frisson of high and low created by an acute observer deploying a device built for play and speed.”
Commentary |
on Yes and No by John Skoyles, Alive at the End of the World by Saeed Jones & True Figures by David Blair
“Jones’ language rises off the page with oral authenticity — as well as sits firmly on the page as wise rage and heartbreaking grief. It echoes with a voice that stays new …”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Bernd & Hilla Becher, Jeff L. Rosenheim, ed., & War Is the Greatest Evil by Chris Hedges
“Never including people and always showing their objects before an overcast sky casting few shadows, the Bechers weren’t exactly documentarians nor did they ever suggest that their meticulous images were fine art.”
Commentary |
on The Last Days of Terranova, a novel by Manuel Rivas, translated from the Galician by Jacob Roberts
“What distinguishes his approach isn’t that he reroutes the generic storyline much but that he festoons it with winsome, slithery sentences and references born from Rivas’s own literary wanderings.”
Commentary |
on Bel Canto, poetry by Virginia Konchan
“How can a poet speak when language reaches a stalemate, a stoppage in articulation? Konchan demands an answer in order to save herself from an ongoing battle between creation and silence, chaos and order, the self and the other …”
Commentary |
on What The Thunder Said: How The Waste Land Made Poetry Modern by Jed Rasula
“Understanding the trends out of which The Waste Land was born, and those to which it gave birth, requires Rasula to offer a genealogy of modern art, which displays his exceptional ability to survey complex cultural histories in succinct and lucid prose without scanting nuance.”
Commentary |
on The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing and Postwar American Literature, nonfiction by Josh Lambert
“He is most persuasive in his overview of the history of Jews in American publishing (from which they and other minorities were excluded by the WASP establishment) and the role of Jewish publishers in supporting writers of diverse ethnicities.”
Commentary |
on How to Turn Into a Bird, a novel by María José Ferrada, translated from the Spanish by Elizabeth Bryer
“The narrative is propelled by 11-year old Miguel’s relationship with his uncle Ramón, who decides to live on the Coca-Cola billboard he is responsible for maintaining.”
Commentary |
on Dawn, a novel by Sevgi Soysal, translated by Maureen Freely
“Soysal’s characters, so human and fallible, remind us of ourselves and make us wonder how we would react when the heavy hand of an authoritarian government strikes suddenly and violently.”
Commentary |
on Seduced By Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative by Peter Brooks
“He associates fiction with a form of play ‘crucial to our survival because it is crucial to our capacity to understand our place in the world.'”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Dawn by Sevgi Soysal, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely & The Visible Unseen by Andrea Chapela, translated from the Spanish by Kelsi Vanada
“Chapela proceeds toward what agitates her – if she aspires to be a writer but cannot perceive the ‘truth’ about herself or establish a one-to-one correspondence between a word and a thing, then how does one proceed and with what intended effects?”
Commentary |
on P I E C E S, poems by Hank Lazer
“For Lazer, the word ‘it’ is crucial because it contains multitudes. What the meaning is is the question. It is there somewhere, beginning from the note left to him by his uncle in an unfinished notebook; or as ritual; or as the weather; or as a koan …”
Commentary |
on December Breeze, a novel by Marvel Moreno, translated from the Spanish by Isabel Adey & Charlotte Coombe
“Although, like some of her characters, Moreno managed to overcome her circumstances and move beyond the narrow circle in which she had been raised and indoctrinated, her independence and the freedom to devote herself to her art came at a high price.”
Commentary |
on Some of You Will Know, poems by David Rivard
“I once compared the experience of reading Rivard’s work to following a friend who’s a better skier down an expert run you wouldn’t make alone.”
Commentary |
on In the Roar of the Machine, poems by Zheng Xiaoqiong 郑小琼, translated by Eleanor Goodman
“The languages here are of transnational capitalism — standardized Chinese and global English — and Zheng is trying, with her references to classical Chinese, her seizure of the bureaucratic language of factories, her repeated return to the scene of the crime, to make language new so that she and hers will have a place to call home.”