Commentary |
on Axiomatic, essays by Maria Tumarkin
“Despite its many strong, uncompromising and forcefully delivered opinions, the book does not shrink or mold into a shape you easily explain — or explain away. Its inner workings are complex.”
Commentary |
on Pigs, a novel by Johanna Stoberock
“Pigs falls within a literary tradition of questioning, oblique enchantments, written to give singular expression to many anxieties, rather than to call up a one-to-one correspondence with the world’s problems.”
Commentary |
“Such Little Things We Are”: on Swift: New & Selected Poems by David Baker
“Swift reintroduces Baker’s older poems into our current environmental and political landscape while revealing how the lyric speaker can engage the natural world during moments of acute personal grief …”
Commentary |
on It Would Be Night in Caracas, a novel by Karina Sainz Borgo, translated from the Spanish by Elizabeth Bryer
“… a delicate, heartrending portrait of a woman devastated by loss — first of her mother, then of her apartment, then of her identity, and finally her homeland …”
Commentary |
on Everything Inside, stories by Edwidge Danticat
“Danticat returns to the short story genre with a ripened patience, as if the long-haul caretaking of her energies for her award-winning nonfiction work and second novel seasoned her story writing.”
Commentary |
“Who’d Want To Be A Man?”: on Eyes Bottle Dark With a Mouthful of Flowers by Jake Skeets & Father’s Day by Matthew Zapruder
“Zapruder is ruthless in his willingness to face down hard wrongs … and Skeets calls back into the fold of the present all who have been turned by its injustices and bigotry to ash.”
Commentary |
on The Incompletes, a novel by Sergio Chejfec, translated by Heather Cleary
“Chejfec’s novels are in dialogue with each other, all featuring unnamed, male narrators with a shared passion for walking. They sift through the past, often focusing on individuals from whom they’ve been separated.”
Commentary |
on The Boy in the Labyrinth, poems by Oliver de la Paz
“Lonely and crowded, loving and remote, The Boy in the Labyrinth is a paradoxical book—a collection of poems heavy and complicated with metaphor trying to understand two sons on the autism spectrum.”
Commentary |
on W. S. Graham, poems selected by Michael Hofmann
“It’s not that Graham’s aesthetic was particularly crafty or complex: a statement in one of his letters says it all, while at the same time invoking an odd choice of namesake: “One only tries to send a message, a note, however inadequate, from one aloneness to another. STOP, don’t let me sound like Billygraham.”
Commentary |
on Inland, a novel by Téa Obreht
“Just as Obreht stretched the boundaries of realism in her 2011 novel The Tiger’s Wife about conflict in her native Yugoslavia, in Inland she offers her own version of the mythic narratives of the American West.”
Commentary |
on Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser
“It may be that Sontag’s most important legacy is that she cleared a path for writers who could claim their intelligence without fear, without shame, without closets.”
Commentary |
on The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care by Anne Boyer
“Boyer refuses typical pink-ribbon euphemisms and instead offers a truer slogan: fuck white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’s ruinous carcinogenisphere.
Commentary |
on Deaf Republic, poems by Ilya Kaminsky
“The light that shines from the language in Deaf Republic illuminates the terrible truths about what Philip Larkin called ‘the misery that man hands on to man.'”
Commentary |
on Spiritual Choreographies, a novel by Carlos Labbé, translated by Will Vanderhyden
“The story always feels grounded in genuine experience, in objects and spaces, in clothes and colors. But the identities attached to those experiences are loose, unseated.”