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on Nothing Happened and Then It Did, essays/stories by Jake Silverstein
“An awful lot of fiction is immensely autobiographical, and a lot of nonfiction is highly imagined,” writes David Shields in Reality Hunger. “We dream ourselves awake every minute of the day. ‘Fiction/nonfiction’ is an utterly useless distinction.” A life is lived in secret among ruptures and congealings of comprehension. To express the quality of such…
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on Dear Money, a novel by Martha McPhee
Martha McPhee’s fourth novel is narrated by India Palmer, a 38-year old Manhattan-based novelist with four critically respected mid-list books to her credit and a fifth one nearing release. Two children, a satisfying marriage to an artist, a university teaching job. But each moment points only to the need and desire for money. It is…
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on One More Theory About Happiness, a memoir by Paul Guest
I turned to Paul Guest’s memoir One More Theory About Happiness because he has written poems like this: ON THE PERSISTENCE OF THE LETTER AS A FORM Dear murderous world, dear gawking heart, I never wrote back to you, not one word wrenched itself free of my fog-draped mind to dab in ink the…
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on Addiction and Art, ed. by Patricia Santora, Margaret Dowell & Jack Henningfield
A few years ago, my migraine-afflicted friend Margot submitted a painting to a call for entries. The Migraine Awareness Group (MAGNUM) was looking for artworks expressing the anguish of that condition. A pharmaceutical company had donated $400,000 to sponsor a touring bus-based exhibit. When art is recruited by advocacy, the latter usually insists on literal…
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on The Dragonfly, selected poems 1953-1981 by Amelia Rosselli, translated by Giuseppe Leporace and Deborah Woodard
In anthologies of 20th century Italian poetry in English translation, one may find Saba, Campana, Ungaretti, Montale, Pavese, Pasolini and Scotellaro -- but never Amelia Rosselli. Yet writing about her work in 1963 just before the publication of her first book, Variazioni belliche, Pasolini said, “I have never run across anything of its kind, so…
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on Poetry in Person: Twenty-Five Years of Conversation with America’s Poets, edited by Alexander Neubauer
"There are few things less pleasing than a writer talking about his own work," wrote Graham Greene in a letter to a reviewer in 1960. Fortunately, he permitted himself to be unpleasant, otherwise we couldn’t now enjoy the conversational brio of his 1953 Paris Review interview. Although extraneous to the reader’s experience of his work,…
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on The Bradshaw Variations, a novel by Rachel Cusk
Rachel Cusk recently took up the spurious question “Can creative writing ever be taught?” in an article in the Guardian. Rather than defend the practice, Cusk preferred to expose the motive of the “apparently well-meaning” questioner. She wrote, “It strikes me that people really ask the question out of a need to refer to their…
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on An Algebra, poems by Don Bogen (University of Chicago Press)
In “The Moon in the Water,” a poem in Don Bogen’s third book Luster (2003), an actor playing Tarzan “jogging half-naked through the arboretum / is the relic of an Olympic swimming star.” The speaker holds himself above “the soggy domestic comedy of a jungle bungalow” played out by Tarzan, Jane and Boy. Language throughout…
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on Don Juan, His Own Version, a novel by Peter Handke, translated by Krishna Winston
The narrator of this tale is a former master chef who lives in his run-down failed inn. The time is the present. Don Juan appears suddenly, hurtling over his garden wall, pursued by a couple on a motorcycle. For the next seven days, Don Juan enjoys his host’s cuisine, sits with him in the garden…
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on Three 2009 Poetry Titles by Terese Svoboda, Mark Nowak, and John Bradley
Weapons Grade, poems by Terese Svoboda (University of Arkansas Press) Again and again, one hears poets praised for “bridging the personal and the political,” but erecting these generally modest spans has become rather habitual for most American poets who include civic materials in their bag. In her sixth book, Terese Svoboda takes aim at an…
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Twenty-One Poets Recommend New and Recent Books of Poetry
For the third springtime, I’ve invited poets to tell us about their favorite new books of poetry. This year they picked titles by Richard Jackson, Ted Mathys, Hillel Halkin, Beth Bachmann, Dora Malech, Valzhyna Mort, D.A. Powell, Louise Glück, Kevin Young, John Burnside, Olena Kalytiak Davis, David Blair, John Murillo, Sarah Gambito, Tom Yuill, Heather…
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on A Reader on Reading, essays by Alberto Manguel
Radim Kralik, the owner of Grapo Technologies, a Czech company producing wide format printers, lives in a 3,660-foot modernistic concrete box atop a converted grain silo in Olomouc, about 175 miles east of Prague. The New York Times reports that to accommodate a library inherited from his grandfather, his architects built a bookshelf that thrusts…
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on Stone Lyre, poems by René Char, translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson
When René Char died in 1988 at the age of 80, President Jacques Chirac called him “the greatest French poet of the twentieth century.” The writer Françoise Giraud remarked that Chirac “would read poetry behind a copy of Playboy” presumably to preserve his reputation as a seducer, but it’s more likely that Chirac encouraged the…
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on The Stranger Manual, poems by Catie Rosemurgy
It’s been more than 30 years since I heard Bill Matthews remark at a reading that a poet must submit to confusion and fear – and not make poems as charms against them. As intended, his counsel stiffened my spine. Who could argue? Yet if I recall the moment so clearly, or believe I do,…