Commentary

Commentary |

on Blame, a novel by Michelle Huneven

reviewed by Ron Slate

Michelle Huneven’s Blame, her third novel, has been discussed in The New York Times Book Review, on NPR, and in newspapers and book blogs around America. Its premise is out in the open. Patsy MacLemoore, a 29-year old history professor and a repeat DUI offender, wakes up in the local lockup from an alcoholic black-out…

Commentary |

on Essays by Wallace Shawn

reviewed by Ron Slate

Inconceivable! Wallace Shawn has collected five pieces he wrote for The Nation, interviews with Noam Chomsky and Mark Strand, a speech, and other miscellanea into a book called Essays. His prose may often rest on a banality (“… we like to feel superior to others. But our problem is that we’re not superior”) but his…

Commentary |

on Self-Portrait with Crayon, prose poems by Allison Benis White

by Ron Slate

Horace proclaimed, “Ut Pictura Poesis,” and since then poets have wondered about the validity of “as in painting, so in poetry,” even as they make artworks the subjects of their poems. Here is the painting and there is the experiencing poet. But the third thing, the poem, is all that matters. Ekphrasis offers the classic…

Commentary |

on Invisible, a novel by Paul Auster (Henry Holt)

reviewed by Ron Slate

Spend an hour talking with a poet or novelist about their work and chances are they’ll say something about the need to avoid repetition, to change and reinvent. In a 2005 interview with Jonathan Lethem in The Believer, Paul Auster gave his rendition of holding patterns are forbidden. “PA: You try to surprise yourself. You…

Commentary |

on Cockroach, a novel by Rawi Hage (W.W. Norton)

reviewed by Ron Slate

Having attempted to hang himself from a tree, the unnamed narrator of Cockroach must meet with a psychiatrist after his release from a state-run clinic. At the health centre, “Everyone knows that you are going to confess something,” he says, “something evil that was done to you, something evil that you did. Still, the past…

Commentary |

on Taste of Cherry, poems by Kara Candito

reviewed by Ron Slate

Kara Candito’s first book of poems, Taste of Cherry, gathers its dramatic force by recounting and weighing recent events, usually of an intimate nature. The world is recalled as a series of shocks to the senses – told with the bravura of an initiate challenged to fashion a self that measures up to such startling…

Commentary |

on Twilight Visions: Surrealism and Paris, edited by Therese Lichtenstein

reviewed by Ron Slate

In the First World War, France lost one-third of her male population between the ages of 18 and 27. Despite having won the war, the French psyche suffered thereafter from a crise de tristesse sombre, a long siege of black sorrow that ultimately enabled Hitler to occupy Paris virtually unopposed in 1940. Nevertheless, in the…

Commentary |

on Petals of Zero, Petals of One, poems by Andrew Zawacki

reviewed by Ron Slate

“Georgia,” the first of three long poems in Petals of Zero, Petals of One, is both incantation and indictment -- pleading and plaint. It’s also a plummet. As a lament, the poem dwells within and bewails the difficulties of understanding. It implores Georgia for compassionate response. It flatters with attention, and then demeans its Georgia-listener,…

Commentary |

on Dance With Snakes, a novel by Horacio Castellanos Moya, translated by Paula Springer

reviewed by Ron Slate

English-speaking readers discovered Horacio Castellanos Moya last year when New Directions published Senselessness (2004), his seventh novel and the first to be translated. A disturbing story with a comical backbeat, the novel is narrated by a freelance writer who comes to an unnamed Central American country to edit the testimonies of Indians who had survived…

Commentary |

on Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life, essays by Michael Greenberg

reviewed by Ron Slate

In “Sound Booth” Michael Greenberg writes about recording the audio version of his 2008 memoir Hurry Down Sunshine. Like the other forty-four pieces in Beg Borrow Steal, this essay was published in the Times Literary Supplement, meeting the editor’s length requirement of 1100-1200 words. “Sound Booth” finds Greenberg in the booth with a stubborn cough,…

Commentary |

Three New Titles on Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, and Thom Gunn

reviewed by Ron Slate

Visiting Wallace: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Wallace Stevens, edited by Dennis Barone and James Finnegan (University of Iowa Press) At a 2004 conference on Stevens held at the University of Connecticut, Susan Howe compared Stevens’ devotion to linguistic purity to that of Jonathan Edwards. Stevens’ work seems simultaneously to enact a…