Commentary |
The Wolf in the House: on Hinge by Molly Spencer
“You will get used to it. This is the recursive refrain. But what if the structural implication of getting used to it is sustained by the myths which mark one gender as the suffering one?”
Commentary |
on Angels and Saints, essays by Eliot Weinberger
“There is the saint who swallows the Christ child’s foreskin. This happened to her about a 100 times. Or Magdalena of the Cross who revealed after 40 years that she had happily fornicated with a devil named Balban.”
Commentary |
on Petition, poems by Joyce Peseroff
“With all the force of her intellect, Peseroff finds the uncanny in the quotidian; the uncanny is colored by accents that are utterly fresh, and the humanity in the quotidian is illuminated.”
Commentary |
on Murder and the Movies by David Thomson
“Are we then no better than the murderers? Thomson claims, ‘We cling to them and reenact their evil.'”
Commentary |
on The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, a novel by Gina Apostol
“The novel’s core document is a memoir of the Philippine revolution against Spanish colonizers written by Mata, a man nearing blindness … juvenalia, letters from family, travel chronicles, dossiers of revolutionaries …”
Commentary |
on Atlantis, A Journey in Search of Beauty by Carlo and Renzo Piano
“About creativity, the father says, ‘When it first materializes, an idea is a ghost. It doesn’t come into focus. In fact you often regard it with suspicion. Then it returns and you muster the courage to give it a form.'”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Pilar Quintana’s The Bitch, Mark Hage’s Capital, and Grace Schulman’s The Marble Bed
“I’m never quite sure if Schulman’s devotion to concretions springs from a wish to close a gap between poet and world — or to open one up and fill it with a bracing insight”
Commentary |
on Seeing Silence by Mark C. Taylor
“He does not so much throw suspicion on the realist motive as he pulls the rug of the Real from under realism, thus forcing us to ask: ‘How does one see what cannot be seen, speak what cannot be said, hear what remains silent?'”
Commentary |
on The Last Days of Ellis Island, a novel by Gaëlle Josse, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer
“Josse channels the voice of Ellis Island’s longtime guardian as he shutters the entrance to America in 1954 … a poignant tale of reminiscence as well as a commentary on current issues”
Commentary |
on Patches of Sunlight, Or of Shadow: Safeguarded Notes, 1952-2005, by Philippe Jaccottet, translated from the French by John Taylor
“The images he chooses, and the rare metaphors he ventures, are aimed rigorously at the expression of his “mysterious contradiction,” the undeniable immediacy of life which is at the same time lost in the sea of death …”
Commentary |
on Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech, Collected Earlier Poetry by Paul Celan, translated by Pierre Joris, and Under the Dome: Walks With Paul Celan by Jean Daive, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop
“Joris states, ‘Reading a poem of Celan’s at any kind of depth that will honor the poem’s complexity, and translating it, are similar acts with a similar problematic … Anyone who has learned to read Celan’s text knows that it is not a question of deciding on any one meaning.'”
Commentary |
on The Age of Skin, essays by Dubravka Ugresic, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać
“Among authoritarianism’s horrors, for Ugresic, is its relentless sameness — he same glib oligarchs, the same contempt for culture, a social flatness that narcotizes people in the face of violent hatreds.”
Commentary |
on Ordesa, a novel by Manuel Vilas, translated by Andrea Rosenberg
“Evoking a Spain in transition after the death of Franco … Vilas’ prose takes on an incantatory urgency: the fulcrums of our lives are many, scattered across decades: we must revisit them all.”
Commentary |
on Between Lakes, poems by Jeffrey Harrison
“The fear of abandonment haunts Harrison’s poems as they grapple with his idealization of a parent complicated by a need to disparage him.”
Commentary |
“Mapping Modes of Allegiance: The Radical Translations of Don Mee Choi”
“She destabilizes memory — her own, that of her father’s photos, that of testimonies and witnesses — to reveal the multiplicity of human experience under the settled tone of a photo or a map.”