Commentary |
on On Morrison by Namwali Serpell
“Serpell cites the critic Elaine Scarry’s argument that reading is a manual of ‘procedures for reproducing the deep structure of perception’; she affirms Morrison’s body of work as a profound philosophical investigation.”
Literature in Translation |
from Study of Sorrows: “This Evening,” “[After Illness, my earlocks”], “[Who planted that banana tree”] & “Feelings in Spring”
“Should I take a walk / somewhere, like those happy, healthy people? // Let me wait for the sun to dissipate the mist and see / whether this is really a good day.”
Commentary |
on Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography by Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys
“A scrupulous reviser, whose poems went through multiple drafts before they were deemed ready to be gathered in his samizdat pamphlets, Cavafy wrote for posterity rather than for the handful of readers for whom he’d gifted his poems.”
Poetry |
“Turning In”
“And how to write to you who would never read this, / to limit the language so that I might reach you on earth and also in this pretend.”
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.”
Essay |
“Soap: Art of Failure”
“What if instead of saying we have failed we say that we are failuring? What if a practice of imagination is often also a practice of failure?”
Commentary |
on The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls
“The translator does not ‘capture the spirit’ of the foreign text, as translators are so often told, but is affected by the foreign text. Searls’ best advice is to remain open to the experience of reading the text, not to capture it.”
Commentary |
on Question 7, a novel by Richard Flanagan
“Memoir, fiction, criticism, political punditry, a pinch of travelogue: Flanagan sees a mash-up of genres as the form perfectly tailored to our mashed-up era — history as theater of the absurd.”
Commentary |
Outlasting Wreck and Ruin: A Pilgrim’s Progress in Heather Treseler’s Auguries & Divinations
“… myths of femininity and sexuality, carceral impediment, empire, labor, suburban (and other domestically and culturally prescribed) exigencies, fertility, and the ‘magical thinking’ by which women can grow into themselves despite systematic obstacles.”
Commentary |
on The Art of Dying: Writings 2019-2022 by Peter Schjeldahl
“Schjeldahl, for the benefit of his devoted audience, demystified both art and writing about art. ‘Each of us,’ he commented in 2004, after visiting a Vermeer exhibit, ‘is born with a capacity to see and feel intensely and with precision.'”
Commentary |
on No Judgment, essays by Lauren Oyler
“Does Oyler know that her negative reviews have had an impact? Sure. Does she care? She doesn’t … not care, but observes that caring too much about it is playing a different game than what the critic does.”
Literature in Translation |
from Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death, or Language Haunted by Sex
“Retired Lieutenant Dostoevsky, age twenty-seven, for having taken part in criminal designs, having circulated a personal letter filled with impertinent expressions against the Orthodox Church and the sovereign power and for having attempted, together with others, to circulate works against the government through means of a private printing press, is condemned to death.”
Essay |
“I see a postman everywhere”: Elizabeth Bishop’s Postcards
“Bishop often mailed postcards from locales while expressing a longing, on the written (verso) side, to be elsewhere. Or she editorialized the postcard’s depiction of her location, adding captions, often ironizing or qualifying it.”
Text and Image |
“Proximate Postcards (I)”
“I leaned towards him and ran my tongue across the rim of his upper lip. He trembled, inhaling sharply, emitting a thin clarinet-like whistle. The febrility of his response was disappointing.”
Commentary |
on Calligraphies, poems by Marilyn Hacker & Collected Poems by Ellen Bryant Voigt
“Although the pair differ from one another in their concerns and methods, they share a durable — and sometimes quirky — mastery of prosody that is unmatched in contemporary verse.”