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.”
Poetry |
“Three Days,” “Coppice” & “Cicadas”
“I think he didn’t want me to see. He told me to go check the rods. / When I came back, the hare’s jacket was off, his intestines were out, and we baked him on the grill.”
Commentary |
on The Age of Guilt: The Super-Ego in the Online World by Mark Edmundson
“His chief goal is to attach the super-ego and its turd-in-the-punchbowl qualities to the culture wars. The super-ego, he submits, is behind the worst of right and left politics.”
Commentary |
The Perpetual Virtuosities of Alice Fulton: on Coloratura On A Silence Found in Many Expressive Systems
“… she ranges nimbly among operatic extravagance, virtuosic ornament, bedrock intelligence and technical chops … but also attends to the hidden, the blue, notes between notes, to what’s nearly obscured or in the margins.”
Literature in Translation |
“Onwards,” “Too Philosophical,” “Doll,” “The Comfort of Complaining,” “The Benefits of Talking,” “To a Writer,” “Self-Reflection” & “I Wish I Had”
“How ghostly my life / in its fall and rise. / Always I see myself waving to myself, /’ floating away from the one waving. // I see myself as laughter, / as deep mourning again, ‘/ as a wild weaver of talk; / but all this falls away.”
Fiction |
“I Saw Elvis in Palm Springs”
“Claudia was in Palm Springs because she’d made a fairly lucrative commercial deal with a Japanese yogurt company and wanted to go somewhere alone where she could pretend she’d come by the money in a more respectable way. Like phishing or selling drugs.”
Essay |
“‘A Giving of the Self’: on Thom Gunn and Courtliness”
“Looking over the span of Gunn’s writing, I get the sense of someone grounded in his own being, a self he inhabits with great confidence and apparent ease in large part because he is not especially concerned with himself.”
Literature in Translation |
from Motherfield
“Every year the motherfield is a bride / under a thin muslin of snow, / under the strict supervision of tradition, / it is smoothed with rakes, / combed with ploughs, / inseminated.”
Commentary |
on Come Back in September, a memoir by Darryl Pinckney
“Pinckney’s growth is a function of his understanding the limitations of the circle that’s invited him in — its intellectual distance from the crises they write about, its interpersonal dramas, its whiteness.”
Poetry |
from the “Monpeyroux Sonnets”
“A rainy Monday, everything is shut. / It could be late October; it’s mid-May. / Lights on at noon, outside, rain drums on gray / paving stones, drainpipes, voices.”
Commentary |
on Midwest Materials, photographs by Julie Blackmon
“She has a trained eye for children’s rambunctiousness, the way they eagerly claim and rework adult spaces, and the fear they can strike in mom and dad’s hearts … All of which gives her best photos a frisson of uncertainty.”