“If Badkhen is interested in glimpses of a world beyond the muck of human life, Anne Fadiman keeps a close eye on the world she knows best — her life at home in western Massachusetts and her classroom in New Haven.”
“The book couldn’t be timelier: the wars in the Middle East signal the folly of American Empire, seeking to entrap other countries, an historical inflection point — an ‘unraveling of political cultures built up over many decades.'”
“Isbell’s songs provide the language for saying something that so few of us can say on our own, whether we’re racked by guilt or shame or grief for all the things that life does to us, and we do to life.”
“Lazer’s poetry attests to the ambiguity attending to questions of spirit; that it is unsettled, in process – a doubt, a question, a restless questing negativity, eating away at its own boundaries.”
“A speaker at the memorial for my friend Miles is saying / that when his wife died eleven years earlier, Miles never /got over it, which reminds me of a letter in the advice / column of today’s paper …”
“As When Waking is rare among debuts in that it does not primarily announce a personality. It announces a system … These poems are not confessions; they are structures of listening.”
“Oh my old friend now gone your fierceness is not abstract / It’s a matchless voice a calling out saying / I am here forever in the poems and damn you who think otherwise the nerve / You tyrants buried in my curse”
“The work in True Mistakes often reflects on getting things wrong while imagining what getting things right might look or sound like. This amounts both to an attitude and a technique.”
“three hurricanes blew through no one / at the beach I waded ankle / deep glanced out to sea / a white fin parallel to keep me company”
“With all my education — / my shelves and shelves of books, // my two degrees, I shrank into oblivion / as he lied and hid my pathology / report from me.”
“Kertész was wincingly aware in his lifetime of what he saw as his artistic misfortune and neglect, but by posthumously landing Albers as his biographer, he’s gotten lucky.”
“Martin has written a cruel and thrilling book, one whose satire reflects with terrible clarity the ways we want to hurt each other.”
“… how poet-translators used translation to present the ambiguity of language, the complexity of creative expression, and their subjectivity as values of democratic pluralism.”
“The past stretched over the field / impenetrable // I didn’t know others would be going so soon”
“… psychological realism isn’t Boyle’s goal so much as a vivid portrait of decline. Entropy and ferality is Boyle’s business as a novelist; his grand theme is that we fail.”
“Perhaps the ‘secret’ of Dylan’s late stage creativity resides in his ability to store and process an enormous database of information about himself and the history of American folk music.”
“Whenever I arrive at my regular coffee shop in the morning with my dog, Juneau, I hope that there will be other dogs on the wide front deck. If I don’t have sufficient caffeine in a single-shot latte by 9 a.m., I’ll get a migraine, but I don’t come to the coffee shop only for the lattes. I come for the dogs.”
“He’s perpetually questioning — or being questioned about — his recollection of events, and so he seeks out the recollections of others to help him interpret what he believes he experienced. But the accuracy of these details is rarely as important as the way that Halfon the character has processed what he or his loved ones have endured.”
“Skipping to school. Skipping / school. Skipping stones across // water. Skipping stones altogether.”
“Tse’s dream-like approach to the extreme political tensions between Hong Kong and China engages the European tradition of city writing while playing to her own strengths as a surrealist writer.”
“I had planned to have the Chinese students over during spring break. A group of us had been meeting to translate poems by the late Chinese poet, Hai Zi (海子), and we’d had several conversations about Chinese and American culture.”
“At the heart, the collection is about what the bonds between parent and child are made of, offering a story not just about separation but violent renting and grief.”
“The narrator recounts this disquieting story not because he can sum it up neatly but because, in putting it down on paper, he’s creating a version he can live with.”
“This prairie town shunned outsiders, kept dirt local: / Divorce, two suicides, abandonment, / unspoken scandal of a pregnant woman’s fall …”
“… circuitous narratives brimming with associative leaps, which showcase her command of vernacular speech, and carry one with a sturdy dream logic.”
“the minority / which is not a minority / mail messages / to themselves // in preparation / (dying?) / of the field / of action —”
“He offers advice to would-be translators, warning that ‘literally following the source language is no guarantee of success’ and that ‘a translator needs to take imaginative risks and imbue the translation with emotional vitality.'”
“This was a war in which less than two percent of officers were Black – even as Robert McNamara and the Pentagon looked to Black neighborhoods to fill General Westmoreland’s request for hundreds of thousands of young men.”
“Lear, / It’s ok. / You have your way / Of doing / This senescence, / I have mine.”
“It wasn’t clear / how long the muses / dressed as lunch ladies / kept the place open // The room got dark / though the sun was still out / I went home to think about it”
“From my glance, which seeks a place to anchor, / comes a cloudy gloom overhanging the mirror, / like a harsh frost that lands / its white cold stamp.”
“From inhabiting the body where a third of its days are spent dreaming, traces remain. A feature in an open air theater. A whiff of the neighbor’s flower bed. A forbidden urge.”
“Magnified thirty-five times, / the birdsfoot ovary / appears to blossom inward, / three groups of petals / in pale green glass.”
“Sufien, the protagonist of Paradiso 17, would never be as happy again as he was in a refugee camp in Syria. During the 1948 war, when he was five years old, his family was driven out of their home in Safad, Palestine,”
“Because I am a teenager in it. And because the 21st century has not begun to outrage me yet. / And because I am somewhat like a teapot in my bell-bottoms at this time.”
“He was on the point of leaving when the oboist, unwinding her yellow scarf, strode in. A pointed effort to pervert the Rorschach. Children pointing at stars through bare branches.”
“The great landmarks of Baroque music are musical reflections of meditative prayer much in practice when devastation and sectarian conflict increased the intensity of spiritual yearning.”
“‘I should have gotten down on bended knee and thanked my mother-in-law for banging her head against that patriarchal ceiling,’ Svoboda writes. ‘Should have’ are the operative words.”
“Schnapps and blueberry juice in glistening tulip glasses / to greet us as we step from the deluge. // Ljubljana, because of the music of its name. / And because I’d once heard Tomaž Šalamun read.”
“In Gaelic, fox is sionnach, or madra rua / (red dog), rain-beaded, skinny; a fox / querying for food, pantomiming / with his paws something indecipherable.”
“… the story of an irrepressible malcontent who, though calm on the surface, denies and resists many aspects of her existence in order to … survive? Be superior? Control everyone else? Deconstruct her own narrative?”
“You love coming to the dentist, says my dentist with his fingers in my mouth. After I rinse, I smile and say no, I just like you!”
“… Frigid abode / where spurned fools pour gasoline on embers, / feeding unspoken thoughts to their remorse.”
“A nursery clerk sold her on these / invasives — They’ll be 10, 20 feet, / in no time — the city girl believed.”