Commentary |
on Ethics, edited by Walead Beshty
In 1930, while waiting in the cold outside a Leningrad prison where her son had been jailed, Anna Akhmatova met a woman, also with an imprisoned son, who asked her, “Can you write about this?” According to Giorgio Agamben, who relates this story in On Potentiality, Akhmatova instantly committed herself to writing — but not…
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on The Wild That Attracts Us, edited by ShaunAnne Tangney & Robinson Jeffers: Poet and Prophet by James Karman
“Why does so much deep silence surround the name of Robinson Jeffers?” asked Horace Gregory in his 1953 review of Hungerfield, Jeffers’ sixteenth collection of poems. But Gregory knew the answer. Seven years earlier as the United States emerged victorious from World War II, the adamantly non-partisan Jeffers published The Double Axe, including the long…
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on Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
At Cambridge University in 1965, James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. debated the following question:** “Has the American Dream been achieved at the expense of the Negro?” Baldwin explained how the American power structure systematically oppresses the black individual who must ultimately tell themself that “nothing you have done has helped you, and nothing…
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on The Blue Girl, a novel by Laurie Foos
The multi-voiced narrative is a near-obligatory routine for many mainstream novelists. It satisfies benign inclinations – first, to display one’s ample virtuosity, and then, to flatter the reader’s presumed perspicacity. Any single fictional character may see only a part of a situation but the reader is persuaded that he/she can see it all. Since no…
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on The Travels of Daniel Ascher, a novel by Déborah Lévy-Bertherat, translated by Adriana Hunter
In March 1942, German SS officers and their French hosts began deporting Jews from the Gare d’Austerlitz in Paris to their deaths in Eastern Europe. Before being led onto convoys by French gendarmes, Jews were held in a crumbling housing project at Drancy, a northern suburb. Today a commemorative plaque hangs there with this inscription…
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on Paper Collage by Georges Perros, translated by John Taylor
“I write. It’s not my trade. No trade resembles man. It’s what I can do,” writes Georges Perros in the third and final edition of Papiers collés (Paper Collage), the aphoristic literary and philosophical jottings for which he is best known. He continues: “I know that if I’m not writing, something is not quite right…
Commentary |
on On Elizabeth Bishop by Colm Tóibín (Princeton University Press)
With On Elizabeth Bishop, the novelist Colm Tóibín presents an appreciative introduction to Bishop’s life and work, as well as an occasion for Bishop lovers to pick The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 off the shelf and revive the old pleasures. Encountering her poetry, Bishop’s new readers have often wondered if she provides more or less than…
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Twelve Poets Recommend New and Recent Titles
Welcome to The Seawall’s semi-annual poetry feature. This season, twelve poets write briefly on some of their favorite recently published titles. This multi-poet/title feature is posted here in April and November. The commentary includes: Sally Ball on The Do-Over by Kathleen Ossip (Sarabande) Kevin Prufer on Digest by Gregory Pardlo (Four Way Books) Lisa Russ Spaar on The…
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on Ban en Banlieue by Bhanu Kapil (Nightboat Books)
Ban en Banlieue is a tour-de-force hybrid text, “an intense autobiography” whose performance notes, rituals, photographs, journal entries, short fictions, end-notes, and appendix Bhanu Kapil assembles in the aftermath of “a novel never written.” Kapil, a British-Indian emigrant living in Colorado, documents her failure to write a historical novel about a 1979 race riot in…
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on White City Black City by Sharon Rotbard and Letters to Palestine, Vijay Prashad, editor
Israeli architects are a contentious lot. In July 2002, the Israeli Association of United Architects canceled its participation at the World Congress of Architecture in Berlin after the Israeli leadership rejected its own catalog for presenting a hostile view of settlements in the West Bank. The catalog was titled A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of…
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on Barely Composed, poems by Alice Fulton
At the moment, I can’t think of a poet more consistently motivated by – and dependent on – her antagonists than Alice Fulton. In a 1990 essay, she writes, “If people notice an idea, they can argue against it, thus undermining it. But a more secluded assumption won’t be disabled. It will be absorbed and…
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on Privy Portrait, novel by Jean-Luc Benoziglio, translated by Tess Lewis
Literary critics usually place Jean-Luc Benoziglio’s novels within the late century post-structuralist mode. His texts, they say, are presences in themselves, not intended to direct the reader’s gaze to a world beyond words. His parodic manner disparages literary conventions. And so on. But Benoziglio was disinterested in language theory and had almost nothing to say…
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on Palace of Books, essays by Roger Grenier, translated by Alice Kaplan
Among the last living greats of post-WWII French literature, Roger Grenier seems to have known everyone and done everything. Now at 96, he has produced perhaps his final book, Palace of Books, a collection of ten essays on writing, writers, and readers. But Grenier shows little of the summing-up impulse, no wish to memorialize his…
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on Lillian On Life, a novel by Alison Jean Lester
The term “pitch perfect” is applied so liberally in book reviews that one hesitates to use it at all -- a modifier for language awarded credibility because it sounds familiar. But aren’t the most engaging presences strangely themselves, alluring because they reward our aptitude for discovery? And what of voices daring to integrate “pitches” that…
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on Breathturn Into Timestead: Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan, translated by Pierre Joris
“Paul Celan more than any other poet poised the word against its affiliations,” said Heather McHugh, one of several Anglophone translators of Celan’s poetry. Reading his work, one may also wonder if his words are poised against translators. In her introduction to Glottal Stops: 100 Poems, McHugh and co-translator Nikolai Popov wrote, “No one can…