Commentary |
on Great Disasters, a novel by Grady Chambers
“When you don’t make decisions for yourself, the world makes decisions for you — large and small, which Chambers’ novel expertly traces.”
Commentary |
on Just About Anything: New & Selected Poems by Jonathan Aaron
“His problem is, the speaker admits in ‘Just About Anything,’ a personal one: he often finds himself ‘of too many minds / when it comes to, you name it, just about anything.'”
Commentary |
on Thank You for Staying with Me, essays by Bailey Gaylin Moore
“… the radical honesty of her voice defiantly pushes back against the idea that women should have to apologize for simply existing in a world where they face constant judgment.”
Commentary |
on Tantrums In Air, poems by Emily Skillings
“In real time we read Skillings’s speaker thinking through her personal and professional concerns, laugh with her, get frustrated with her, and ultimately, feel empathy with her.”
Commentary |
on Chilco, a novel by Daniela Catrileo, translated from the Spanish by Jacob Edelstein
“Catrileo links the fascist and capitalist policies of Capital City to environmental degradation, emphasizing what activists and indigenous leaders have known for a long time — they are inextricably linked.”
Commentary |
on The Alcestis Machine, poems by Carolyn Oliver
“Space and time consume the speaker because they are the forces that have separated her from a beloved. By mastering them, she imagines returning to that loved figure.”
Commentary |
on A Murder for Miss Hortense by Mel Pennant & An Enemy in the Village: A Bruno, Chief of Police Novel by Martin Walker
“Pennant’s compositional power comes across fully in her presentation of Hortense as a character with multiple weaknesses and strengths, one of which is a commitment to justice.”
Commentary |
on Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography by Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys
“A scrupulous reviser, whose poems went through multiple drafts before they were deemed ready to be gathered in his samizdat pamphlets, Cavafy wrote for posterity rather than for the handful of readers for whom he’d gifted his poems.”
Commentary |
on Things in Nature Merely Grow, a memoir by Yiyun Li
“The most intense emotion she communicates is vexation — a recognition that she’s been shunted into an abyssal, inexplicable place, but is left with no choice but to press forward.”
Commentary |
on Mark Twain, a biography by Ron Chernow
“The scrappy Missouri boy assumed the protective coloring of his affluent in-laws and professional peers. His political views shifted from reactionary to progressive, conforming to values he’d found among New England’s WASPs.”
Commentary |
on My Heresies, poems by Alina Stefanescu
“My Heresies reminds one that the great devotional poets were rarely doctrinaire, that they often embraced themes that would trouble the conventionally pious.”
Commentary |
Book Notes: Nonfiction — on Love and Need by Adam Plunkett, Hypochondria by Will Rees & The Only Face by Herve Guibert
“If Guibert was reluctant and prudent about making photos, it was not because he found the medium itself to be corrupt, but rather because his eye was alert for signs of the transitory nature of his own life as a gay man.”
Commentary |
on Pink Dust, poems by Ron Padgett
“The collection’s most poignant drive is the drive of aging, the awareness of death, and a kind of rising calm and good humor in the face of it.”
Commentary |
on A Calligraphy of Days: Selected Poems by Krzysztof Siwczyk, translated from the Polish by Piotr Florczyk and Alice-Catherine Carls
“There are beginnings upon beginnings, a state of becoming that never takes itself for granted. The poems work by vigilant observation and the negotiation of the feeling that arises from such worldly evidence.”
Commentary |
on The Pulse of Contemporary Turkish, by Buğra Giritlioğlu and Daniel Scher
“The poets featured here are contemporaries of one another, their work often a result of shared sensibilities, politics, and aesthetics, a response to the work of 20th-century Turkish poets that came before them.”