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Twenty Poets Recommend New & Recent Titles
Welcome to the Seawall’s annual fall poetry feature. Below, twenty poets write briefly on some of their favorite new and recent collections. This multi-poet/title feature is posted here annually in April and December. The commentary includes: David Rivard on Helsinki by Peter Richards (Action Books) Hank Lazer on Yingelishi by Jonathan Stalling (Counterpath Press) Elaine…
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on Bento’s Sketchbook by John Berger
Starting with Ways of Seeing in 1972, John Berger has written out of wonderment about art making and expression. While most art historians and critics make discoveries and then engrave them into books, Berger’s creative essays give the sense of discovering as they proceed. In Bento’s Sketchbook, Berger returns to the subject of drawing and…
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on What I Don’t Know About Animals, non-fiction by Jenny Diski
It was the habit of Jacques Derrida’s cat to follow the philosopher into the bathroom. The door would close behind cat and naked man. Then the cat would stare up at the philosopher’s genitals. Apparently Derrida’s cat was very much like Jenny Diski’s cat Bunty, insofar as Derrida and Diski share certain notions on observing…
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on Self-Portrait of an Other: Dreams of the Island and the Old City by Cees Nooteboom, translated by David Colmer
Cees Nooteboom’s name appears perennially on the long list of candidates for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Born in 1933 in The Hague, he is one of the world’s most accomplished and adventurous writers, having produced 14 books of fiction and 26 non-fiction titles (mainly travel narratives). Eight of his novels are or were available…
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on The Family Fang, a novel by Kevin Wilson
C.G. Jung has helped generations of adults to get even with those who misunderstood them as children – or at least, he has long been impressed into that service. An often-quoted line from his essay “Paracelsus” abets revenge: "Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment, and especially on their children, than the unlived…
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on Humiliation, by Wayne Koestenbaum
In the beginning, there was humiliation. This is the ur-myth in the restive heart of Humiliation, Wayne Koestenbaum’s garrulous, sleeve-tugging, and beguiling long essay. Humiliation is not just his obsessive topic but also a point of departure, a space to pass through, a destination, and the fuel for the trip. “ ‘Humiliation’ means ‘to be…
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on Cream of Kohlrabi, stories by Floyd Skloot
In 2008, Floyd Skloot agreed to write a story for Portland Noir, a collection from Akashic Books that appeared the following year. His contribution, ”Alzheimer’s Noir,” was the first story he had written in six years. It is included in Cream of Kohlrabi, Skloot’s new selection of sixteen stories, the other fifteen of which were…
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on Get Me Out of Here, a novel by Henry Sutton
Henry Sutton’s sixth novel, Get Me Out of Here, begins with Matt Freeman returning to an optician’s shop in London. Apparently, he has intentionally broken the frames acquired earlier from the shop. About the new frames he is contemplating, he says, “I was certain that I could break them. Indeed I knew that I would…
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on Figures in a Landscape, poems by Gail Mazur
Gail Mazur’s distinguished body of work reads as an irresolvable argument with herself, but at its core it takes unabating delight in its own contrariness and the enigmas of human relationships. The tension between opposing forces is omnipresent: the grip of memory versus the ascent of vision, the suspicion of bathos versus the urgency of…
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on La Seduction by Elaine Sciolino
“France is having its Anita Hill moment,” Elaine Sciolino writes in a recent issue of Time regarding the infamous behavior of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. “Women suddenly said that the Mad Men style of behavior they had put up with for so long at work – the leering, the inappropriate touching, the sexual banter – was not…
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on The Vices, a novel by Lawrence Douglas (Other Press)
The unnamed narrator of Lawrence Douglas’ second novel, The Vices, is a writer whose “suburban Jewish novel” lands him a residency at Harkness College in western Massachusetts. There he meets Oliver Vice, a professor of philosophy. “Over the years,” he says, “I’ve come better to understand that writing about someone dear is never an innocent…
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on Recent Poetry by Barbara Claire Freeman, L. S. Klatt and Dora Malech
Incivilities by Barbara Claire Freeman (Counterpath Press) In his new book of rich essays, Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life, Oren Izenberg notes that the theory and practice of Language poetry “make authorial intention and readerly attention look incidental to the project of manifestation -- the difficult work of indicating a universal…
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on Here On Earth, A Natural History of the Planet, by Tim Flannery
At the Pratt Institute in 1973, Louis Kahn delivered a remarkable lecture at the School of Architecture. His subject was the nature of creativity and the role of the architect. “Inspiration is the feeling of beginning at the threshold where Silence and Light meet,” he said. “Silence, the unmeasurable, desire to be, desire to express,…
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on Where Art Belongs, essays by Chris Kraus
In September, 2009, an art collective called Bernadette Corporation exhibited “The Complete Poem” at Greene Naftali, a commercial gallery in Chelsea. The show comprised 38 quasi-fashion photographs by David Vasiljevic, and a 130-page epic poem by Eileen Myles called “A Billion and Change.” The pages were displayed under Plexiglas on thirteen long, slim, wooden tables…
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on Quiet Chaos, a novel by Sandro Veronesi, translated from the Italian by Michael F. Moore
In the field of mental health, what were once emotions are now symptoms. With a push from the pharmas, feelings to be endured get pathologized as illnesses to be treated. In 2013, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the bible for mental health practitioners, will add a new class of bereavement-related disorders. A…