Commentary |
on Light Everywhere, poems by Cees Nooteboom, translated by David Colmer
Cees Nooteboom’s first novel, Philip and the Others, was published in 1955, and the following year brought his first book of poems. Thirteen more collections and seven novels have followed. Born in The Hague in 1933, Nooteboom is a renowned literary figure in The Netherlands and Europe, though in the continent’s popular culture his 23…
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on Dept. of Speculation, a novel by Jenny Offill
Jenny Offill’s second novel, Dept. of Speculation, is staged with the brio of a one-woman show determined to keep its audience engaged and on edge. She succeeds. Both Offill and her unnamed narrator thrive on the strength of a belief that verbal dexterity is the most important resource in winning people over and achieving one’s…
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on Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings
Walter Benjamin’s writings speak compellingly through their insistence that there is a latent history in everything we create, in all things made. The obstinacy and desperation of his life are harrowing to consider, just as his fierce intellectual independence is bound to inspire. About Proust and A la Recherché du Temps Perdu, Benjamin wrote, “He…
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on Drafts for a Third Sketchbook by Max Frisch, tr. by Mike Mitchell
In 1981 at the age of 70, Max Frisch bought a loft at 123 Prince Street, New York. His eighth and final novel, Bluebeard, was finished and ready for the printer. A few years later, he would write a final play (he had produced eleven). For the moment, he set to work on his third…
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on All Russians Love Birch Trees, a novel by Olga Grjasnowa
A landlocked region of 1,700 square miles in the Caucasus, Nagorno-Karabahk declared itself an independent republic in 1991 when the Soviet Union crumbled. The territory lies inside Azerbaijan but its population is dominated by ethnic Armenians. Since the late 1980’s, skirmishes between Azeris and Armenians have killed over 30,000 people; over one million have fled…
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on Permission, poems by Katie Peterson
The composer Ned Rorem defined an artwork “as the result of a marriage of true minds; the minds are within one individual, and so is the marriage, which, before being consummated, causes many a beautiful dish to be broken.” Marriage is a form that accommodates both tension and truce. The reader of Katie Peterson’s poems…
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on Time, edited by Amelia Groom
In my early teens I took drum lessons after school from a local jazz and standards band leader. I would go to his house where he set up two kits in his drafty basement. Affably half-drunk by four o’clock, he would say, “We don’t keep time, son, we make time.” Keeping time was for bass…
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on Starlite Terrace, stories by Patrick Roth, translated by Krishna Winston
Born in 1953 in Freiberg im Breisgau and brought up in Karlsruhe, Patrick Roth arrived in Los Angeles as an exchange student in 1975 to study English and Romance languages. Soon he was studying film instead. In 1984, Roth’s fledgling company produced its one and only film, the 60-minute “The Killers,” based on Charles Bukowski’s…
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on 1001 Winters, poems by Kristiina Ehin, translated from the Estonian by Ilmar Lehrpere (Bitter Oleander)
A generous, representative, bilingual selection of Kristiina Ehin’s verse, rendered from the Estonian by Ilmar Lehrpere, has appeared from the Bitter Oleander Press. 1001 Winters gathers translations from volumes entitled The Drums of Silence (2007), New Moon Morning (2007), Burning the Darkness (2009), Scent of Your Shadow (2010), and The Final Going of Snow (2011).…
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Fourteen Poets Recommend New and Recent Titles
Welcome to the Seawall’s semi-annual poetry feature. This season, fourteen poets write briefly on some of their favorite new and recent titles. This multi-poet/title feature is posted here in April and November. The commentary includes: David Rivard on Collected Poems by Joseph Ceravolo (Wesleyan) Lisa Russ Spaar on Silverchest by Carl Phillips (Farrar, Straus &…
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on Teenie Harris, Photographer, edited by Cheryl Finley, Laurence Glasco and Joe W. Trotter
Charles “Teenie” Harris won his first award at the 1945 Pittsburgh Photographers Show for an image called “Cotton Candy.” Hired in 1940 as the staff photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, Harris would go on to shoot over 80,000 images for that weekly publication. The Courier was the country’s largest African-American weekly, publishing from 1907 to…
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on A Raft A Boat A Bridge, poems by Katherine Soniat
In “Cosmos,” the fourth poem in Katherine Soniat’s A Raft A Boat A Bridge, the speaker recalls a sleepless night (“I toss my leg over a pillow”) caused by physical pain. But the poem’s unease shifts between the bodily and something indistinct but looming. That day she had been poking around a “deserted villa” up…
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on Italian Identity in the Kitchen, or Food and the Nation, by Massimo Montanari
Before traveling to Perugia this past summer to attend a wedding, I did some research on the region of Umbria. Regarding food, the guides and magazines extol the virtues of the region’s signature cuisine – strangozzi pasta with black truffle sauce, squash and farro soup, penne with Norcia sausage, and Gobbi alla perugina or cardoons…
Commentary |
on Duplex, a novel by Kathryn Davis
The narrator of Kathryn Davis’ seventh novel, Duplex, carries another narrator in her memory named Janice. It is Janice who tells the story of the Rain of Beads in which girls attending a dance at the Woodard mansion get transported by robots to a scow floating above where they are raped, reduced to fragments, and…
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on Arco Iris and End of the sentimental journey, poetry by Sarah Vap
A long epigraph by Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) opens the way to Sarah Vap’s jaunty essay-in-passing on poetry’s language, pedagogies, commonplaces and confusions, End of the sentimental journey: a mystery poem (Noemi Press). Here is a fragment: “ … at the very moment when the soul is about to organize its wealth, its discoveries, its revelation,…