Commentary |
on Our Riches, a novel by Kaouther Adimi
“Edmond Charlot called his Algiers bookstore Les Vraies Richesses, the title of a book by Jean Giono. The store measured a mere 21 feet long by 12 feet wide.”
Commentary |
“Poets Recommend” / Part III
In the third of four installments of this spring’s “Poets Recommend,” we comment on recent books by Sarah Gambito, Chard deNiord and Page Hill Starzinger
Commentary |
on And Their Children After Them, a novel by Nicolas Mathieu, translated from the French by William Rodamor
“The French know, better than anyone, that the coexistence of human beings in relations of equality and freedom is possible. Rousseau told them so. But they also know that he was consistently pessimistic that humanity can escape from a dystopia of alienation.”
Commentary |
on Square Haunting: Five Lives in London Between the War by Francesca Wade
“H. D., Dorothy L. Sayers, Jane Ellen Harrison, Eileen Power, and Virginia Woolf — from 1916 to 1940, each person lived in various addresses on Mecklenburgh Square in London’s Bloomsbury area.”
Commentary |
“Poets Recommend” / Part II
In the second of four April installments of “Poets Recommend,” we comment on recent books by Ron Padgett, John Murillo, and Tony Hoagland
Commentary |
Book Notes: Larry Kearney on Jack Spicer, Writers on Abortion, John Berger’s Life
“Dr. Williams had spoken about ‘the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses’ – and perhaps no poet has heard those words as acutely as Spicer …”
Commentary |
on Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts Into Tears by László Földényi, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet
“Many of the essays, when they are not opening windows onto the vertigo of everyday experience, seek the causes for our cultural desensitization.”
Commentary |
on Marrow and Bone, a novel by Walter Kempowski, translated by Charlotte Collins
“A sense of having threaded the needle of a cataclysm pervades Kempowski’s work, and points to a baseline mysticism in his writings — if survival is fundamentally fortuitous, so, too, is the return of the past.”
Commentary |
on Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World, poems by Kathryn Cowles
“There is always, for each of us, a speechless condition of possibility for speech – and the world Cowles ‘puts’ words to, the everyday life, is haunted by the sensation of that possibility.”
Commentary |
“Poets Recommend” / Part One
In the first of four April installments of “Poets Recommend,” we comment on new collections by Aaron Smith, Tommye Blount, and Fiona Benson
Commentary |
on Obit, poems by Victoria Chang
“Chang investigates the death of her mother, the illness of her father, as well as her hope for her children — all to show how grief is not simply a response to loss but the killing of many things, bit by bit …”
Commentary |
on Hurricane Season, a novel by Fernanda Melchor, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes
“As of the middle of March, nearly 400 women have been murdered in Mexico this year. Melchor’s novel focuses its brutally exacting eye on a single case.”
Commentary |
on Dangerous Earth by Ellen Prager
“Reading Dangerous Earth may feel much like being upheaved from your reading chair, borne by the winds of meteorological cataclysms …”
Commentary |
on How To Be Depressed by George Scialabba
“What he wants for us is not the sunlit sparkle of antidepressant ads on TV but that you ‘release into blessed everyday unhappiness.'”
Commentary |
on In An Invisible Glass Case Which Is Also A Frame, poems by Julia Guez
“Each poem puts me in mind of a small art installation, something constructed in a closet or maybe a box.”