Commentary |
on Wellwater, poems by Karen Solie
“A dual focus on extractive capitalism and nature’s increasing fragility, on the former’s slow violence against the latter and its respective citizenry, has been her artistic crucible since Short Haul Engine (2001).”
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Book Notes: Novels — on Near Distance by Hannah Stoltenberg, The Holy Innocents by Miguel Delibes & Paris, So To Speak by Navid Kermani
“In Near Distance, there are subtle critiques of those who pursue ‘a greater truth than the one others lived by’ – an acidic appraisal of self-deception posing as social enlightenment.”
Commentary |
on Old Stranger, poems by Joan Larkin
“Larkin’s poetry, and her writing on recovery for the Hazelden Foundation, has often been concerned with naming silenced experiences and bringing them into the light.”
Commentary |
on Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe by Carl Zimmer
“The book’s most trenchant theme: science is shaped and driven by the political and cultural values of the individuals and institutions that fund investigations, whether private endowments or the federal government.”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Serendipity by Carol Mavor, A Woman I Once Knew by Rosalind Fox Solomon, Gliff by Ali Smith & Your Steps on the Stairs by Antonio Muñoz Molino
“Interactions, small gestures, and supposition attain sharp profiles in contrast to the dystopian surround. Rescuing language from its servile usages is Gliff’s essential occurrence.”
Commentary |
on Nevermore by Cécile Wajsbrot, translated from the French by Tess Lewis
“Nevermore is a … record of the act of translation as an all-consuming thought process … Wajsbrot could not have created such a complete account of a translator’s experience without having herself translated Woolf’s The Waves …”
Commentary |
on Flesh, a novel by David Szalay
“… a wise and haunting book that permits the reader to draw conclusions as it chronicles one man’s journey through the frequent trembles of life.”
Commentary |
Book Notes: Poetry — on Aurora Americana by Myronn Hardy, In The Glittering Maw by Joyce Mansour & Book of Exercises II by George Seferis
“The damaged thing, the life we all sustain and witness, may suffer in fragments, but Hardy proceeds fiercely, not tempted to illuminate the shards gaudily for the sake of a facile empathy.”
Commentary |
on Dispatches From the District Committee, a novel by Vladimir Sorokin, translated from the Russian by Max Lawton
“Although Sorokin’s more satirical aspects seem like they could be used to recreate an accurate portrayal of the society he’s mocking, there are other moments that feel more prescient in their ire.”
Commentary |
on Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction by Andrea Barrett
“Barrett: ‘I had little sense … of how essential chaos is, how great a role serendipity, intuition, and timing play. How much waste is essential.'”
Commentary |
on Exit Zero, stories by Marie-Helene Bertino
“The cumulative effect of reading the new stories is that you feel changed by them, intoxicated, as if you expect something very different from reality after having tasted Bertino’s version.”
Commentary |
on Bumblebees, poems by Deborah Meadows
“Bumblebees has the kinetic energy of recycling, rearranging, assembling — not simply a way to look at art, but also a method we can follow in our attempts to mitigate the planet’s degradation.”
Commentary |
on You Are Leaving the American Sector: Love Poems, a poetry chapbook by Rebecca Foust
“Foust’s precise language is the ultimate rebuke to forces seeking to erase ‘our shared & stored history’ and she’s frank in expressing the limits of what an individual can do against state-sponsored confusion.”
Commentary |
on Ultramarine, a novel by Mariette Navarro, translated from the French by Eve Hill-Agnus
“The protagonist is an unnamed female captain of a cargo ship who, despite a typical childhood of family, school, and love, always felt different, and prone to taking flight and disappearing.”
Commentary |
on The Synthetic Eye: Photography Transformed in the Age of AI, by Fred Ritchin
“The social utility of photojournalism has eroded as images are Photoshopped, morphed, repeated, and politicized in ways that make even outsize tragedies feel mundane.”