April/May/June 2026 Edition

Commentary |

on After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order by Rana Dasgupta

“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.'”

Essay |

“We Try to Ignore the Elephant Somehow”

“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.”

Commentary |

on Abundant Life: new & selected poems by Hank Lazer

“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.”

Poetry |

“You Thrill Me So” & “Art”

“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 …”

Commentary |

on As When Waking, poems by Daniel Schonning

“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.”

Poetry |

“Suite for Alice”

“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”

Commentary |

Book Notes — on The Reservation, a novel by Rebecca Kauffman, True Mistakes, poems by Lena Moses-Schmitt, Talking Classics by Mary Beard & Every Time We Say Goodbye, a novel by Ivana Sajko

“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.”

Poetry |

“Waiting for a Girl Like You”

“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”

Poetry |

“To Virginia, Lucia & Sylvia”

“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.”

Commentary |

on Everything Is Photograph: A Life of André Kertész by Patricia Albers

“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.”

Commentary |

on Down Time, a novel by Andrew Martin

“Martin has written a cruel and thrilling book, one whose satire reflects with terrible clarity the ways we want to hurt each other.”

Commentary |

on Translation Multiples: From Global Culture to Postcommunist Democracy by Kasia Szymanska

“… how poet-translators used translation to present the ambiguity of language, the complexity of creative expression, and their subjectivity as values of democratic pluralism.”

Poetry |

“What is this fierce light”

“The past stretched over the field / impenetrable // I didn’t know others would be going so soon”

Commentary |

on No Way Home, a novel by T. C. Boyle

“… 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.”

Commentary |

on After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace by Robert Polito

“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.”

Essay |

“Dog People”

“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.”

Commentary |

on Tarantula, an autofiction by Eduardo Halfon

“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.”

Poetry |

“Grandsons alongside, Grandfather trundles …,” “Those children hop …” & “Skipping to school …”

“Skipping to school.  Skipping / school.  Skipping stones across // water.  Skipping stones altogether.”

Commentary |

on City Like Water, a novel by Dorothy Tse, translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce

“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.”

Essay |

“I Always Want to Wear Spring”

“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.”

Commentary |

on If You Would Let Me, poems by Maggie Dietz

“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.”

Commentary |

on The Invisible Years, a novel by Rodrigo Hasbún, translated from the Spanish by Lily Meyer

“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.”

Poetry |

“This Book Belongs To”

“This prairie town shunned outsiders, kept dirt local: / Divorce, two suicides, abandonment, / unspoken scandal of a pregnant woman’s fall …”

Commentary |

on The Near and Distant World, poems by Bianca Stone

“… circuitous  narratives brimming with associative leaps, which showcase her command of vernacular speech, and carry one with a sturdy dream logic.”

Poetry |

“The Oracular Mirror” & “In the Mountains”

“the minority / which is not a minority / mail messages / to themselves // in preparation / (dying?) / of the field / of action —”

Commentary |

on Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry by Arthur Sze

“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.'”

Commentary |

Book Notes — History: on The War Within a War by Wil Haygood, The Chosen and the Damned by David J. Silverman & Stay Alive: Berlin 1939-1945 by Ian Buruma

“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.”

Poetry |

“In These My Lear Years”

“Lear, / It’s ok. / You have your way / Of doing / This senescence, / I have mine.”

Poetry |

“A Multi-Stemmed Deciduous Shrub of Great Beauty When in Bloom,” “The Art of the Novel” & The History of Music”

“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”

 

Commentary |

on Don’t Stop, a novel by Bonnie Friedman

Literature in Translation |

“My City,” “Beginning of a Song,” “My Hands” & “The Smile Grieves”

“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.”

Literature in Translation |

“Traces,” “The Kite” & “Wilderness”

“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.”

Poetry |

Viola pedata (Birdsfoot Violet)”

“Magnified thirty-five times, / the birdsfoot ovary / appears to blossom inward, / three groups of petals / in pale green glass.”

Commentary |

on Paradiso 17, a novel by Hannah Lilith Assadi

“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,”

Poetry |

“I Love Wonder Bread in This Poem” & “Missing Soul Report”

“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.”

Lyric Prose |

“Gothic Punctum”

“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.”

Essay |

“Froberger — An Outward Journey Inward”

“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.”

Commentary |

on Hitler and My Mother-in-Law, a memoir by Terese Svoboda

“‘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.”

Poetry |

“The Rains of Ljubljana”

“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.”

Poetry |

“September Ars Poetica”

“In Gaelic, fox is sionnach, or madra rua / (red dog), rain-beaded, skinny; a fox / querying for food, pantomiming / with his paws something indecipherable.”

Commentary |

on The Vivisectors, a novel by Missouri Wiliams

“… 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?”

Lyric Prose |

“Ars Poetica: Aww”

“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!”

Poetry |

“Suspect Routes” & “Explain the Heart”

“… Frigid abode / where spurned fools pour gasoline on embers, / feeding unspoken thoughts to their remorse.”

Poetry |

“Transplants”

“A nursery clerk sold her on these / invasives — They’ll be 10, 20 feet,  / in no time — the city girl believed.”