Recent Entries:

Murray Bail’s beguiling fourth novel, The Pages, begins with Erica Hazelhurst, a 46-year old professor of philosophy, and Sophie Perloff, a 43-year old psychiatrist, driving from Sydney to a remote sheep farm in New South Wales.

Reflecting on Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Bishop advised herself as follows: “Portray not a thought, but a mind thinking … The ardor of [an idea’s] conception in the mind is a necessary part of its truth, and unless it can be conveyed to another mind in something of the form of its occurrence, either it has changed into some other idea or it has ceased to be an idea, to have any existen

Barbara Ras’ third book of poems, The Last Skin, is marked by worship and worry. Her materials include the death of a parent, travel and meditation, nature and memory, serial wars, time. But it is the profound, implacable tension sparking through those materials that create her distinct manner – graceful or erratic gestures veering between the devotional and the quizzical.

In From Shakespeare to Existentialism, Walter Kaufman wrote, “One learns to ask about every philosophy and every religion, and about great poets and artists, too: What is it that they praise?”

The Horse Has Six Legs: An Anthology of Serbian Poetry, edited and translated by Charles Simic (Graywolf)
Seriously Funny, edited by Barbara Hamby and David Kirby (Georgia)
Poetry of the Law, edited by David Kader and Michael Stanford (Iowa)

“An awful lot of fiction is immensely autobiographical, and a lot of nonfiction is highly imagined,” writes David Shields in Reality Hunger. “We dream ourselves awake every minute of the day. ‘Fiction/nonfiction’ is an utterly useless distinction.” A life is lived in secret among ruptures and congealings of comprehension.