Commentary |
on The Monster I Am Today: Leontyne Price and a Life in Verse by Kevin Simmonds
“Simmonds looked to Price for inspiration since she had already broken the race barrier. He also clung to the wisdom of his early singing teachers, who were Black and had cautioned him, ‘Don’t let them change your voice. It’s a naturally dark sound. Like Price.'”
Commentary |
on Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001–2021 by Yusef Komunyakaa
“A bracing range of interrelated subjects, which often change register and perspective not just between pages but between sentences — much as what is in one’s brain can change from second to second.”
Essay |
on “Poems Not Written” — a recurring feature On The Seawall
“A poet’s job, if we can call it a job, is not to be a stenographer, recording in blunt shorthand terrible moments … so culpability might be determined. A poet’s job is to remind us of the networks along which feeling — traumatic and otherwise — travels and oftentimes warps: cellular, familial, temporal, sociocultural, historical.”
Commentary |
on Gallery of Clouds, hybrid nonfiction by Rachel Eisendrath
“Fiction ‘never lieth,’ Sidney wrote, because it never presumed to tell the truth. Yet we crave the fiction that fiction promises. If we can’t wholly inhabit fiction, Eisendrath asks, how do we live with it?”
Commentary |
on The Selected Letters of John Berryman, edited by Philip Coleman and Calista McRae
“A lively, expansive portrait of a brilliant, ambitious, difficult, and deeply troubled man, along with a wealth of information for anyone interested in this polarizing poet’s life and work … and a revealing window onto the dynamics of the mid-20th century literary world.”
Essay |
“The Mariner” and “Mauve”: from Plastic: An Autobiography
“He underestimated desire, the frenzy of passion for the glittering Empress in her cage of color. Perkin had found the first product with global demand to be made from coal tar. His discovery opened the way for drugs, fertilizers, and plastic …”
Commentary |
Constellating the “Once”: on The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems by Arthur Sze
“Sze continues to ponder the role of sentience in comprehending and translating the prismatic and generative paradoxes of the world …”
Commentary |
“Poets Recommend” — Part I
In the first of several installments of this annual feature, we comment on recent collections by Khaled Mattawa, Rachel Long, and Kimiko Hahn
Commentary |
on Piñata Theory, poems by Alan Chazaro & An Incomplete List of Names, poems by Michael Torres
“The new generation of Chicano poets is negotiating themes such as identity and masculinity but through a millennial lens — fully aware of the challenges in their communities, but whose consciousness has been shaped by the previous generation’s successes and shortcomings.”
Commentary |
on The Earliest Witnesses, poems by G.C. Waldrep
“Waldrep does not let the sorrows and pain that both attend and define this book — the sicknesses, the surgeries, the omnipresence of war, the loneliness of the ‘tourist’ — have the final say … The Earliest Witnesses chooses clarity — which, in this case, means faith.”
Commentary |
on Zorrie, a novel by Laird Hunt
“The meditative, eerie, and beautiful Zorrie is a journey story — but Hunt tinkers with our expectations, turning it from an adventure tale into an elliptical, more questioning book about why we move in the first place.”
Essay |
“The Coffee Klatsch,” “The Long Ride Home,” “Timeshare” and “Breathing Lessons”
“… and I’d have this nearly imperceptible fantasy while stirring the Sweet & Low into the matcha that I would cause an explosion, that our little corner of Brooklyn would suddenly burst into flames …”
Commentary |
on The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, a novel by Gina Apostol
“The novel’s core document is a memoir of the Philippine revolution against Spanish colonizers written by Mata, a man nearing blindness … juvenalia, letters from family, travel chronicles, dossiers of revolutionaries …”
Poetry |
“October 6, 2016,” “October 30, 2016,” “[unsent draft]” and “March 1, 2017”
“A man I once loved said forgive me each time he committed even the smallest transgression. / He’d drink the last beer in the fridge and say forgive me as he lowered his body to mine on the couch.”
Text and Image |
“The Silence Is Still In Me”: Covid ICU Images
“I admit that I agonized for 24 hours before deciding to accept the assignment. Ultimately, I knew that I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t take those pictures.”