Commentary |
on A Symmetry, poems by Ari Banias
“It is the guarantee of the changing of one thing to another and then, possibly, back again, that achieves lyric symmetry.”
Commentary |
on Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, by Benjamin Dreyer
“a sensible common-law approach to adjudication, eager to impose consistency but operating always with an ear tuned to the music of prose …”
Commentary |
on Handbook of Tyranny by Theo Deutinger
“Theoretically, according to the territoriality of law, stateless people should not exist, which is why there is no answer to their needs.”
Commentary |
on feeld, poems by Jos Charles
“The poems seem, without illusion, to be trying to make a home, not only for the parts of her experience rendered unspeakable in our public conversation, but for her …”
Commentary |
on Another Life, a memoir by Theodor Kallifatides, translated by Marlaine Delargy
“He is losing his grasp on his art, it becomes clear, because he has lost his grasp on the kind of society he is living in.”
Commentary |
on Sons of Achilles, poems by Nabila Lovelace
“This battle royale aspect — ducking a punch from one direction only to immediately throw one in another — of life on our blocks and in our homes is what Nabila Lovelace attempts to communicate …”
Commentary |
on An Untouched House, a novella by Willem Frederik Hermans, translated by David Colmer
“Hermans’ novels reflect a world in the grip of dynamics unknowable to the author — except as psychologically chaotic.”
Commentary |
on Threat Come Close, poems by Aaron Coleman
“He enhances the world in view through an agility with language that dares to take on both the tenacity of history and the quaking of his own emotion.”
Commentary |
on The Sweet Flypaper of Life, photographs by Roy DeCarava and text by Langston Hughes
“Hughes responded enthusiastically when the then 35-year old photographer showed him over 2,000 images of the people and places that made up the tapestry of Harlem life.”
Commentary |
on Winslow Homer and the Camera: Photography and the Art of Painting, by Dana E. Byrd and Frank H. Goodyear III
“Rather than using photography to replicate images in paintings, Homer ‘became more concerned with its unique visual effects’ …”
Commentary |
on My Bishop and Other Poems by Michael Collier
“Collier reminds us that there is in poetry a political place for the genuine — the closely attended-to, paradoxical full menu of experience that yields a sense of something akin to what might be called a truth.”
Commentary |
on To Float In The Space Between, essays by Terrance Hayes
“Lyric time is a crisis of narrative – story spiraling out of control”
Commentary |
on The Fix, poems by Lisa Wells
“First books by poets usually wave one flag as signature; Wells is simply both more desperate and non-compliant.”
Commentary |
on Evening in Paradise and Welcome Home: A Memoir With Selected Photographs and Letters, by Lucia Berlin
“In 1960, she writes her friend Ed Dorn in a panic over signing an option with Little, Brown for her first novel. ‘Oh, can you possibly see how marvelous and terrifying this is for me?'”
Commentary |
on Monument: New & Selected Poems by Natasha Trethewey
“She watches the past so we don’t forget it. She watches the future so we might know it. She watches language so we might learn it.”