Commentary |
on Soutine’s Last Journey, a novel by Ralph Dutli, translated from the German by Katharina Rout
“On August 6, 1943 in Champigny, the ailing Soutine was placed in a Citroën hearse for the clandestine 15-mile ride to a Paris hospital where he died on August 9 after surgery for gastric ulcers.”
Commentary |
on After The Body: Poems New and Selected by Cleopatra Mathis
“Mathis grows impatient with the blandishments of her generation’s period style, with its hushed refinements and scrupulously crafted metaphors, and seeks an edgier sort of utterance.”
Commentary |
on What Is The Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life by Mark Doty
“Doty writes not only of coming to terms with himself as a gay man growing into a queer identity, but also about sex itself, using Whitman’s bravery as inspiration.”
Commentary |
on The Sun Collective, a novel by Charles Baxter
“Baxter’s characters and readers face the same question: why do we need to believe in a bigger idea, a mission or a god or gods in control of our actions in order for a story to make sense?”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Grieving by Cristina Rivera Garza and Forgetting by Gabriel Josipovici
“Garza mourns, ‘There are now at least two generations of boys growing up in an atmosphere where it is ‘natural’ to witness the massive death of women, of young men, of everyone.'”
Commentary |
on The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s by Maggie Doherty
“‘The most important insight’ from that first ‘messy experiment’ was that ‘women’s creative and intellectual lives are shaped by their material conditions and that those conditions must change if women are to be the artists, the writers, the mothers, and the minds that they want to be.'”
Commentary |
on Lay Studies, poems by Steven Toussaint
“… the conflicts exile engenders between a worshipful life on one hand, and an age dominated by spectacle, capitalism, violence, and environmental catastrophes on the other …”
Commentary |
on More Truly and More Strange: 100 Contemporary American Self-Portrait Poems, edited by Lisa Russ Spaar
“… almost all of these poems involve interplay between the ‘I’ and the ‘Eye,’ be that through visual tropes or sleights of hand that call into question the separateness between the poet and the speaker, the speaker and their reflection.”
Commentary |
on Election Eve, photographs by William Eggleston
“Critics eagerly pounced on Eggleston — but he became a major artist all the same because his images’ snapshot-like simplicity belied something more complex and discomfiting.”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Jenny Erpenbeck’s Not A Novel and Masatsugu Ono’s Echo on the Bay
“History, Erpenbeck says, assigns each one of us one of two roles: victim or perpetrator. But ‘who are we, that we may enjoy happiness at the expense of others thanks to a simple matter of selection?'”
Commentary |
on Country, Living, poems by Ira Sadoff
“After decades marked and driven by restlessness, by dissatisfaction with standing still, Sadoff — to employ one of the new book’s titles — finds ‘a moment’s calm.'”
Commentary |
on The Lost Writings by Franz Kafka, translated by Michael Hofmann
“On display here is not so much the work itself as Kafka at work. And one thus discovers how tenuous is the separation of the two.”
Commentary |
Innocence & Violence in Appalachia: on William Woolfit’s Spring Up Everlasting
“Always, the sense that rapture is near — as deliverance from the wounded body, the poverty, the grueling labor, the invisibility of stoicism — and kin to religious ecstasy.”
Commentary |
on Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography, poems by Edgar Garcia
“Columbus appears as a hydra-headed specter who, in an inversion of Virgil’s guidance of Dante through hell, leads the poet-diarist across a landscape of dream-images that drift up from a shared mind.”
Commentary |
on Exposition, Suite for Barbara Loden and The White Dress, nonfiction by Nathalie Léger
“I can’t think of another project that so radically captures the self-consciousness of womanhood, the nature of being watched, judged — the artist losing control of the frame, and then somehow reclaiming it.”