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on Begging For It, poems by Alex Dimitrov
What does it mean to think and live aesthetically in the post-industrial, globalized world? There are long traditions of self-fashioning on cultural, familial, historical, spiritual or religious, economic and other grounds. There is an equally long tradition of fashioning one’s life as a work of art and an object of adoration. But the former modes…
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on Companion Grasses, poems by Brian Teare
Brian Teare’s fourth book, Companion Grasses, is both a field trip and a search-and-rescue mission. It identifies parts of a natural world with a discriminating intensity inspired by writers like Gary Snyder and Rebecca Solnit. But it also seeks and gathers the words that not only specify one’s freed experience of that world, but also…
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“The Next Big Thing”: Lisa Russ Spaar on The Hide-and-Seek Muse
Lisa Russ Spaar: My collection of commentaries about contemporary poetry, The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry, w3as published by Drunken Boat Media in March 2013. Featuring new work by some 58 contemporary poets, along with commentaries and essays by me, the book gathers a selection of the weekly postings about poetry that I wrote…
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on Book of Dog, poems by Cleopatra Mathis
In his essay “Poetry and Pleasure,” Robert Pinsky writes that Walt Whitman worked via “the assumption that what is in him, if he can only follow its tides and creatures as faithfully as a naturalist, will be beautiful and interesting.” His confident largesse would empower him to fulfill the expectations he believed people held about…
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on Stealing History, essays by Gerald Stern
“I don’t know what this book is,” Gerald Stern says from within Stealing History, “a way of remembering, a disgrace. I try desperately now to reach out to those I want or who want me before it’s too late.” Following his 2009 collection of personal and literary essays, What I Can’t Bear Losing, the new…
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on Vanitas, Rough, poems by Lisa Russ Spaar
“A given, inconstancy. / If only I were wired for that gypsy // restless affair …” So begins Lisa Russ Spaar’s poem “Solo Moon” in Vanitas, Rough, her fourth collection of poems. It’s an elevated kind of regret, agitated and sustained by anything that changes suddenly, or challenges the mind with its ineffability, or embodies…
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on Novellas: Ascent by Ludwig Hohl and Life Form by Amelie Nothomb
In Grammars of Creation, George Steiner calls Ludwig Hohl (1904-1980) “one of the secret masters of twentieth-century German prose.” Written between 1934 and 1936 but not published until 1944, Die Notizen is Hohl’s magnum opus, comprising 832 pages of aphorisms, assertions, dreams, recollections and descriptions of daily life. The manuscript consisted of over 3000 slips…
Commentary |
on The Way of the Dog, a novel by Sam Savage
Sam Savage has a flair for failure. Born in 1940 in South Carolina, he wrote poetry and prose fiction throughout his life without publishing much. He had a fling with academia, earning a degree at Yale and studying philosophy in Heidelberg. There was a period of political activism. But he returned to and lived for…
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on Kafka’s Leopards, a novella by Moacyr Scliar
The Brazilian novelist Moacyr Scliar (1937-2011) produced over sixty titles in a variety of genres that also included children’s books, short stories, philosophical studies, and even cookbooks. The Centaur in the Garden (1980) is his best-known novel. His parents emigrated from Bessarabia in 1919 to the southernmost state of Brazil, and his allegorical, fabulist and…
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Nonfiction Round-Up: on Alfred Jarry, Geronimo, and Photographs of Atrocities
Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life by Alastair Brotchie (MIT Press) Geronimo by Robert M. Utley (Yale University Press) Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis edited by Geoffrey Batchen, Mick Gidley, Nancy K. Miller, and Jay Prosser (Reaktion Books) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *…
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on Disposable Camera, poems by Janet Foxman (University of Chicago Press)
In their new book Jews and Words, the Israeli novelist Amos Oz and his historian daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger suggest that the Bible’s Song of Songs may have been written by a woman. “Everyone knows the Bible and its language are deeply patriarchal,” they write, “but why does the same biblical Hebrew become almost feminist when…
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on Jews and Words, by Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger
In The Book of Dialogue, the Jewish poet Edmond Jabès wrote, “Judaism warrants that the written belongs to the unwritten as well as the unwritten to the written, because Utterance means book to the Jew, and book, an ever-resumed reading of his fate.” Born in Cairo, Jabès fled to Paris in 1957 when Egypt expelled…
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on The American Circus and Circus, the Photographs of Frederick W. Glasier
In 1831, some five years before he began his career as a showman, P. T. Barnum grew concerned about the rise of religious zeal and sectarianism in Connecticut. As a local politician, he had argued against blue laws prohibiting gambling. To rub it in the faces of Calvinist church elders, he launched a weekly newspaper…
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on Wartime Kiss: Visions of the Moment in the 1940s, by Alexander Nemerov
Alexander Nemerov is preoccupied with photographic or cinematic images that trigger “a piercing, wounding sensation without explanation,” or as Roland Barthes’ put it, a punctum. The precise lineaments and tones of an image capture the moment, as we like to say, but each picture “unfolds with its own temporal atmosphere.” In Wartime Kiss, his speculative…
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on Prehistoric Times, a novel by Éric Chevillard, translated by by Alyson Waters
The French novelist Éric Chevillard (b. 1964) is often categorized as an “absurdist,” an epithet frightening enough to send most American fiction readers fleeing. But to retreat from him is an absurd and sad mistake. In Prehistoric Times, Chevillard gives us a comically provocative narrative told by an archaeologist, seriously injured during a former excavation,…