Commentary |
on The Distance, a novel by Ivan Vladislavić
“… a retort to the assurances of autofiction and memoir, in which we can comfortably accept a complex story as cohesive because one narrator is telling it. Vladislavić denies his story such easy access.”
Commentary |
on The Math Campers, poems by Dan Chiasson
“Chiasson is destabilizing the authoritarian in himself, the boss of readers, as well as the qualities that may have worked well for him as the ambitious student we get glimpses of at a Catholic high school, sweating good grades in foreign languages.”
Commentary |
on Jill Osier’s The Solace Is Not the Lullaby, Kiki Petrosino’s White Blood & Alice Oswald’s Nobody
“Whereas Petrosino writes into a past whose violence threatens to overtake the present at every line break — and whereas Osier examines her own memories with a trained eye — Alice Oswald looks back even farther.”
Commentary |
on Underworld Lit, a serial prose poem by Srikanth Reddy
“A realm that spans prose and poetry, asking for pause amid the momentum of plot to consider national devastation and nuclear family; things loved, lost, or bought; language borrowed, revived, translated.”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Jaswinder Bolina’s On Color, Robert Creeley’s letters, & Fernando Pessoa as Alberto Caeiro
“Bolina’s essays squeeze one’s arm with the firm, fraternal pressure of a trustworthy adviser. The arm he squeezes, often that of another poet, includes a hand that probably has never taken up race as a topic.”
Commentary |
on Nature Shock: Getting Lost in America by Jon T. Coleman
“Coleman is interested in the ‘befuddled drifters,’ the ‘strays,’ those unfortunate lost souls who ‘stumbled around, made hasty decisions, and sometimes perished only to be buried in unmarked graves.'”
Commentary |
on And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again: Writers from Around the World on the Covid–19 Pandemic, edited by Ilan Stavans
“The essays acknowledge liking ‘the peaceful quiet better when it was voluntary,’ observe ‘the days melt into one another,’ and underscore how Covid-19 confirms a system that ‘punishes the poor and helps the prosperous to thrive.'”
Commentary |
on Frida in America: The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist by Celia Stahr and The Heart: Frida Kahlo in Paris by Marc Petitjean
“Kahlo’s paintings have been perpetually and inextricably tied to her biography in ways that hamper evaluation of her contributions to the development of modernism in the Americas.”
Commentary |
on Little Scratch, a novel by Rebecca Watson
“The tension builds in her internal exploration of how the assault has rooted itself in her body and psyche, in how she frames it, and in how it filters her outlook, especially toward women and men.”
Commentary |
on The Five Books of (Robert) Moses by Arthur Nersesian
“The Bard of the Lower East Side has now produced a post-apocalyptic, multiple narrative tale replete with zombie orgies and freed zoo animals roaming the East Village …”
Commentary |
on Great Demon Kings, a memoir by John Giorno
“… a memoir, most of all, about craving connection in all its forms — noble, ugly, and in-between. Networking, friendship, publicity, audience-building, status-seeking, fucking.”
Commentary |
Odes to Disbelief: on Radiant Obstacles, poems by Luke Hankins
“Maybe he is writing towards joy, but I sense something equally elusive and less certain. I feel like he’s writing towards witness, wonder, and awe.”
Commentary |
on Passage to the Plaza, a novel by Sahar Khalifeh, translated from the Arabic by Sawad Hussain
“In Khalifeh’s novels, the striving for women’s emancipation from patriarchal domination runs in parallel with the desire for Palestinian freedom.”
Commentary |
on Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb by Kenneth Goldsmith
“Culture survives both on the backs of compensated creators and the desire to share. Figuring out that balance has been a challenge for arts and publishing for ages.”
Commentary |
on I Hold A Wolf By The Ears, stories by Laura van den Berg
“… a master of metaphors, flashbacks, meta-commentaries, and shifts from apparent realism into surrealism.”