Commentary |
on Van Gogh and the End of Nature by Michael Lobel
“There’s a dialectic between planting scenes in Arles, emblematized by figures of plowmen and a Sower, and smoke-capped townscapes in the background, teeming with chimneys …”
Commentary |
on The Caricaturist, a novel by Norman Lock
“The events of The Caricaturist are framed by the jingoism that attended the United States’ imperial ambitions generally and the Spanish-American War in particular.”
Commentary |
on Proverbs of Limbo, poems by Robert Pinsky
“Pinsky is our great poet of ambivalence, who asks: how can an artist participate in a culture so hostile to that artist’s existence? And yet, to be dispossessed is to lay claim to all.”
Commentary |
on poetry by Eugenio Montale: Late Montale, translated by George Bradley, and Butterfly of Dinard, translated by Oonagh Stransky & Marla Moffa
“The later poems reveal ‘the essential features of the aged poet’s cast of mind: his sardonic self-deprecation; his skepticism regarding grand theories … his Shakespearean conviction that life is a theatrical performance of, at best, indeterminate import.'”
Commentary |
Book Notes — Fiction: on The Coin by Yasmin Zaher, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel by Yoko Tawada & Swimming in Paris by Colombe Schneck
“By luring us into the severities of this character’s psyche, Zaher simply dispenses with our feel-good ethics, not because those ethics are bad but because they are weak.”
Commentary |
on The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry by Stacey D’Erasmo
“an extended inquiry into how a wide range of artists have managed to sustain their vision — how they’ve kept their other eyes open throughout the length of their artistic careers.”
Commentary |
on Here After, a memoir by Amy Lin
“She is no longer able to sleep, work as a teacher, laugh genuinely, attend to others, or imagine any kind of viable future. She quickly discovers that people are terrified of her suffering — even when she attempts to demonstrate what she calls ‘Good Signs’.”
Commentary |
on Canandaigua, poems by Donald Revell
“The compelling combination of familiarity and deep mystery stems from the varied ways Revell discovers to bring these essential concerns into continually awakening conversations with one another.”
Commentary |
on Exploding Head, poems by Cynthia Marie Hoffman
“Disinterested in portraying a universal experience of obsessive compulsive disorder, Exploding Head is a rich and sensory depiction of a life experienced beyond and outside of diagnosis, entrenched in personal experience.”
Commentary |
on Concerning the Future of Souls, stories by Joy Williams
“Williams’ trademark humor and dry wit persist. Yet a darkness also materializes on nearly every page, mostly in the suggestion that humanity has pushed Earth beyond its breaking point.”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Random Access, photographs by John T. Hill, They Called It Peace by Lauren Benton, The Work of Art by Adam Moss & Cataract by John Berger
“John co-edited The Photographs of W. Eugene Smith and inscribed the copy he gave to me, writing, ‘Ron. Remember Mr. Smith’s advice – manipulation is necessary to get to the truth – or something like that.'”
Commentary |
on Promises of Gold, poems by José Olivarez
“Each poem enacts a mind that moves fluidly and fast, that can delight in play in the same moment it registers anger, or disappointment, or disdain, and that doesn’t need to take itself seriously to say something serious.”
Commentary |
on The Lily in the Valley, a novel by Honoré de Balzac, in a new translation by Peter Bush & Geoffrey O’Brien
“… a novel that repurposes and modifies tropes to dramatize unconscious drives, the complex interplay of domination and submission, repression, and sublimation, set against the Bourbon Restoration.”
Commentary |
on The Invention of the Darling, poems by Li Young Lee
“The collection enacts a return – a volta – from the isolationist and consumptive tendencies of the self and towards the omnific, agape love of the divine.”
Commentary |
on A Word or Two Before I Go: Essays Then and Now & Some Unfinished Business: The Lives of F. Scott Fitzgerald by Arthur Krystal
“He’s an amateur in the etymological sense … simultaneously a throwback and ‘post-‘ everything, and mourns the passing of culture while resisting self-pity.”