Poetry |
from “The Ruins of Nostalgia”
“We were wise to flattery, to certainty, to historicity, but we lay down our burdens for all of them. We were wise to ourselves, in every sense. We were wise to hearts, candy or otherwise.”
Commentary |
on After The Body: Poems New and Selected by Cleopatra Mathis
“Mathis grows impatient with the blandishments of her generation’s period style, with its hushed refinements and scrupulously crafted metaphors, and seeks an edgier sort of utterance.”
Interview |
A Conversation with Juan Felipe Herrera
“One of the first songs I learned was ‘Contraband de El Paso.’ It’s about being picked up by border patrol and taken to Leavenworth. I used to sing that when I was a child.”
Commentary |
on Election Eve, photographs by William Eggleston
“Critics eagerly pounced on Eggleston — but he became a major artist all the same because his images’ snapshot-like simplicity belied something more complex and discomfiting.”
Commentary |
on Exposition, Suite for Barbara Loden and The White Dress, nonfiction by Nathalie Léger
“I can’t think of another project that so radically captures the self-consciousness of womanhood, the nature of being watched, judged — the artist losing control of the frame, and then somehow reclaiming it.”
Commentary |
on Jill Osier’s The Solace Is Not the Lullaby, Kiki Petrosino’s White Blood & Alice Oswald’s Nobody
“Whereas Petrosino writes into a past whose violence threatens to overtake the present at every line break — and whereas Osier examines her own memories with a trained eye — Alice Oswald looks back even farther.”
Commentary |
on Underworld Lit, a serial prose poem by Srikanth Reddy
“A realm that spans prose and poetry, asking for pause amid the momentum of plot to consider national devastation and nuclear family; things loved, lost, or bought; language borrowed, revived, translated.”
Essay |
“Confessions of a Pareidoliac”
“Imagine trying to find your way with a compass that wants every direction to be north. This is more or less where we are, perceiving the world around us by means of instruments that find patterns everywhere.”
Commentary |
on Great Demon Kings, a memoir by John Giorno
“… a memoir, most of all, about craving connection in all its forms — noble, ugly, and in-between. Networking, friendship, publicity, audience-building, status-seeking, fucking.”
Commentary |
on Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb by Kenneth Goldsmith
“Culture survives both on the backs of compensated creators and the desire to share. Figuring out that balance has been a challenge for arts and publishing for ages.”
Interview |
“Don’t Disturb This Groove”: A Conversation with Major Jackson
“I often seek metaphorical language that could open up possibilities of understanding my nature, all the suffering as well as the ecstatic. That search becomes a singular obsession, for it is where readers experience eternity, where mysteries are revealed.”
Commentary |
on In Praise of Fragments, poetry by Meena Alexander
“Fragments of memory, of place, of home and the meaning of home, of mother and grandmother and the generations of women connected through blood and literature: ‘She is a bitter crystal that never shatters.'”
Commentary |
on American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise by Eduardo Porter
Porter asserts, “The America that built the most prosperous working class the world had ever seen collapsed into a heap of pathologies simply due to a lack of empathy.”
Commentary |
Out of Silences: on Nervous System by Rosalie Moffett and Post & Rail by Erica Funkhouser
“These two stirring collections show us that, faced with silence, uncertainty, and unfathomability, poets are often born — in part from the need, in Funkhouser’s words, ‘to supply the words themselves.'”
Essay |
“December”
“Books don’t prepare you for what’s coming. Manuals for pregnant women must have been written by mothers completely drugged by love for their children, without the slightest pinch of critical distance.”