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on The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry, edited by Mark Weiss & It’s Not You, It’s Me, edited by Jerry Williams
The statue of José Martí (1853-1895) is situated at the 59th Street entrance to Central Park near the Grand Plaza. The Cuban poet-patriot is depicted at the moment Spanish bullets ripped into him at the Battle of Dos Rios. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia changed Sixth Avenue into The Avenue of the Americas in 1945 to celebrate…
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on Director’s Cut, a novel by Arthur Japin, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer
In 1990 Federico Fellini directed La voce della luna, his final film. In the years before his death in 1993, unsuccessful in raising funds for new projects, Fellini created a TV commercial for a bank and dedicated it to a Signora Vandemberg. The actress in the commercial bore a strong resemblance to Fellini’s last lover,…
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on Look At Me! by Orville Gilbert Brim & Right Here on Our Stage Tonight! by Gerald Nachman
Briefly celebrated for Typee and resenting the expectations of his new audience, Herman Melville complained, “All fame is patronage. I want to be infamous.” The cultivation of fame is conventionally regarded as inappropriate behavior. A reporter once asked Al Pacino how he deals with fame. He answered by quoting a line from the play “The…
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on Eight White Nights, a novel by André Aciman
A nameless man tells this story: I like to walk through my city. Its places speak to me. Once I met an attractive woman and obsessively wanted her. But I’m timid. She appreciated my friendship but longed for another. She apologized for the necessity of having to hurt me. Although agitated, I was devoted to…
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on The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Parts of the story of Henrietta Lacks have been told before – in a 1976 Rolling Stone feature, a 1986 university press title, a 1996 BBC program, in numerous newspaper and magazine articles through the years, and at symposia and conferences. While adding to the facts, Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is…
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on Apparition & Late Fictions: A Novella and Stories by Thomas Lynch
After The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade was nominated for a National Book Award in 1997, Thomas Lynch became the most famous funeral director in America. PBS went on to produce an episode of “Frontline” about him. When my father-in-law died in 2001, I gave a copy of the book to our hospice…
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on Portions, poems by Hank Lazer and Long Division, poems by Andrea Cohen
In his essay “Questions of ‘Spirit” (2000), Hank Lazer writes, “Poetry is, and sacredly so, most direct in its indirection and in its habitual concealment, in its very refusal to ‘mean’ directly. Knowingly, the poem is a hymn to the unknowable – poetry as an approximation and an intimation.” Honoring a world of dynamic semi-obscurity…
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The Seawall’s Most Popular Reviews in 2009
Here are our most frequently read book reviews for 2009. Many thanks to all our friends who helped to bring attention to new writing and grow our audience. POETRY Salvinia Molesta, by Victoria Chang (University of Georgia Press) Body Clock, by Eleni Sikelianos (Coffee House Press) Twenty-four Poets Name New Favorites Petals of One, Petals…
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on Burning Down the House, by Charles Baxter, and A Friend of the Family, by Lauren Grodstein
“Insight is one of the last stands of belief in a secular age,” writes Charles Baxter in his punchy essay “Against Epiphanies.” Like many other assertions in Burning Down the House (1997), recently reissued by Graywolf with two new essays, this one prods fiction writers and poets alike to examine their most basic impulses and…
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Non-Fiction: on Ghostbread, by Sonja Livingston; Utopias, edited by Richard Noble; and Squeezed by Alissa Hamilton
Sonja Livingston’s Ghostbread is a memoir about growing up poor, fatherless, white, Catholic, and one of seven children in the bleak neighborhoods of Buffalo and Rochester, the towns along Lake Ontario, and an Indian reservation during the 1970s. “I see with agonizing clarity from where I stand,” she writes in the epilogue of those who…
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on Rising, poems by Farrah Field
“In a poem,” wrote Laurie Sheck, “it is not enough to tell the hidden story. The question is also how to look at the subterfuge, the cover, how power functions to block out what it can’t absorb, what would undermine it.” She maintains that language, usurped by insidious forces, must be interrogated, broken down, and…
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on The Lions, poems by Peter Campion
On its pensive surface, Peter Campion’s second collection of poems, The Lions, shuttles between irreconcilable poles: the tumult of human conflict and culture versus the “ancient and ahistorical” life of the animal. While the path between these two pounded stakes becomes rutted with repetition, the poems try to speak beyond their famous motif. The route…
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on And So, poems by Joel Brouwer
“The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities,” wrote Susan Sontag while thinking about E.M. Cioran. Thoroughly up to date -- meaning cut off from the future and removed from the past – a poet is stranded in the present, just like everybody else. But since the poet cares most…
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on Delete by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Total Recall by Gordon Bell & Jim Gemmell, and The Tyranny of E-Mail by John Freeman
The late Dick Egan, my former boss and the founder of EMC Corporation, liked to tell Wall Street analysts that “data storage is like heroin. Once the customer bites, we’ve got him hooked. He’ll need more and more just to keep up.” Wall Street believed him and EMC became the top growth stock of the…