Commentary |
on An Insomniac’s Slumber Party With Marilyn Monroe, poems by Heidi Seaborn
“What does it mean to ‘know’ a celebrity? And what does it mean to be ‘known as’ a celebrity? What does it mean to replay Marilyn’s entreaties to her physicians for medication, for help, for salvation? What does it mean to imagine ourselves inside her trauma?”
Commentary |
on Late Summer, a novel by Luis Ruffato
“Brazil’s poorest citizens have suffered the most under Bolsonaro’s policies … Committed to become a writer, Ruffato made a firm decision to tell the stories of this disregarded demographic in his fiction.”
Commentary |
on What You Can See From Here, a novel by Mariana Leky, translated from the German by Tess Lewis
“Leky’s voice, so even and restrained in today’s fiction babylon, speaks directly to us in language free of writerly modifiers and prettyfiers, wry and independent, almost as pared down as the utterances of her village characters.”
Commentary |
on Bewilderness, a novel by Karen Tucker
“Tucker isn’t interested in providing a model for those desiring to go clean, but rather the troubled clarity of someone who has done so. This spirited telling emerges by way of Tucker’s fine ear for expression stained by adversity and leavened by a comic vibe in a minor key.”
Commentary |
on Of Bridges: A Poetic and Philosophical Account by Thomas Harrison
“… the ways in which our interaction with the physical world is bound — via bridges of thought, imagination, aspiration, despair — to the development of an ethical and aesthetic conduct of life”
Commentary |
on Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, edited by Michael Duncan
“The artists were united in their desire to depict another world, one indescribable via traditional western pictorial means. They would instead utilize form, color and distilled feeling to describe the spiritual world as they perceived it.”
Commentary |
on Popular Longing, poems by Natalie Shapero
“Popular Longing comes at us from a strain of American noir … The crime here is how we live our lives in conditions of competition and selfishness, blinkered by privilege, triggered by our pains, and uneasy about our roles in the system as we participate in our own exploitation and environmental degradation.”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Life in A Field by Katie Peterson and The Woman From Uruguay by Pedro Mairal
“Charles Simic says the poet at work encounters ‘innumerable paradoxes – the astonishment of finding oneself living in two worlds at once.’ The writer behaves in such a way that we are of two minds about them.”
Commentary |
on Disquiet, a novel by Zülfü Livaneli, translated by Brendan Freely, and Brotherhood, a novel by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, translated by Alexia Trigo
“Sarr and Livaneli display uncanny abilities to transport the reader into the lives of oppressed groups – the Syrian Yezidi people and the peaceful Muslims of Kalep — showing just how unfair and cruel life has been for some of them.”
Commentary |
on The Monster I Am Today: Leontyne Price and a Life in Verse by Kevin Simmonds
“Simmonds looked to Price for inspiration since she had already broken the race barrier. He also clung to the wisdom of his early singing teachers, who were Black and had cautioned him, ‘Don’t let them change your voice. It’s a naturally dark sound. Like Price.'”
Commentary |
on Natural Order, photography by Edward Burtynsky
“Shot during lockdown, the images capture a moment when we hit the pause button and nature had a brief opportunity to better compete with us.”
Commentary |
on Manimal Woe by Fanny Howe
“She queries the morality of human acts while preserving a child’s astonishment at the sheer depth and sudden inscrutability of living. Diffidence and a stiffened spine proceed together.”
Commentary |
on Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001–2021 by Yusef Komunyakaa
“A bracing range of interrelated subjects, which often change register and perspective not just between pages but between sentences — much as what is in one’s brain can change from second to second.”
Commentary |
on Clairvoyant of the Small: A Life of Robert Walser by Susan Bernofsky
“Bernofsky could not be more lucid about Walser’s life. But she is equally illuminating about the characteristics of his writing. Bernofsky doesn’t just write about his preoccupations; in her questioning style, she manifests them.”
Commentary |
on The Rock Eaters, stories by Brenda Peynado
“In these stories, readers may find science fiction or fantasy, realism or fabulist, a tennis prodigy or radioactive superheroes. But whatever comes next will be something to savor.”