Commentary |
on The Hum of the World by Lawrence Kramer
“Sound tells us that we are on the brink of the actual. When we sit alone and read, what is the sound humming in our heads while the poem’s intimations begin to murmur?”
Commentary |
on Be Recorder, Carmen Giménez Smith’s Sweeping Poems of Dystopia
“This is the brilliance of Giménez Smith — the scope and range of the poet’s mind and the writer’s ability to traverse such grand and sprawling territory with the reader in tow.”
Commentary |
on Lima :: Limón, poems by Natalie Scenters-Zapico
“With an unflinching gaze, Scenters-Zapico depicts a reality for Latinx fronterizas who have endured disappointment, abuse, and femicide in the El Paso-Cuidad Juárez region.”
Commentary |
on Machine, a novel by Susan Steinberg
“Machine embodies a new kind of novel in verse, a creature that’s part stutter and part song …”
Commentary |
on Who Wants To be A Jewish Writer? and Other Essays by Adam Kirsch
“Kirsch’s essays reflect a wide-ranging interest in poetry, but whether he is considering the Book of Psalms or contemporary poets such as Kay Ryan, Seamus Heaney, and Christian Wiman, his emphasis on the spiritual is foregrounded.”
Commentary |
on Three Women, nonfiction by Lisa Taddeo
“Part of what makes Three Women so entrancing are the unruly implications of these women’s disparate stories.”
Commentary |
on Hard Mouth, a novel by Amanda Goldblatt
“Goldblatt invests her writing with the density of the actual – meaning that this bildungsroman gone atilt doesn’t fit snugly into the fictional or memoirist narratives of grievous dilemmas and triumphalism.”
Commentary |
on Learning from Thoreau by Andrew Menard
‘In his sojourn at Walden, Thoreau was trying to stake out new turf for himself as an American writer. Menard makes the case that Thoreau’s aesthetic was based on juxtapositions, edges, interruptions, and displacements.”
Commentary |
on The Complaints, poems by W. S. Di Piero
“His poems are marked by a gentle, almost-childlike need to be reassured that, amidst the flux and confusion of being in time, someone — some absent ‘you’ — is listening.”
Commentary |
on White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination by Jess Row
“White Flights might best be described as a lament: Here we have a country with a rich ethnic and racial background, and our most acclaimed white writers seem to be strenuously laboring to avoid it.”
Commentary |
on Dual Citizens, a novel by Alix Ohlin
“When the narrator tries to explain and justify her work editing a reality television show to a friend, she might just as easily be describing Dual Citizens: ‘The audience knows it’s watching a fabricated reality and both the fabrication and the reality have equal weight.’”
Commentary |
on Transatlantic Connections: A Literary History by Theresa Malphrus Welford
“Formal poets have been called ‘dehumanized writers of preconceived forms’ and ‘enemies of poetry,’ Despite this hostility, important formal poets emerged in Britain in the 1950s with ‘the Movement,’ then in America in the 1980s with ‘New Formalism.'”
Commentary |
on My Mother’s Tears, a novel by Michel Layaz, translated from the French by Tess Lewis
“The ‘calm violence’ of the mother is an absolute condition; there is no backstory to her behavior, only her monumental affect. What does the son not want to know about her and about himself?”
Commentary |
on In West Mills, a novel by De’Shawn Charles Winslow
“He may be disinterested in modernist gestures. But Winslow shows us that the old ways of being new never lose their currency.”
Commentary |
on Stay and Fight, a novel by Madeline Ffitch
“Stay and Fight isn’t an activist novel in which the heroic environmentalists beat back the encroaching developers. The landscape is too complicated for that now. But Ffitch also envisions a more compassionate world where people can improve the institutions that are holding fast to an environment-wrecking sensibility.”