Commentary |
on Cary Grant’s Suit: Nine Movies That Made Me the Wreck I Am Today by Todd McEwen
“If this book had a voice-over, it would be a combination of William Holden in Sunset Boulevard and Kevin Spacey in American Beauty, wise-asses narrating from beyond the grave.”
Commentary |
on Eastbound, a novella by Maylis de Kerangal
“We encounter Aliocha traveling in a cramped and dirty carriage, along with fellow conscripts from Moscow who don’t have the resources or ingenuity to escape their military service.”
Commentary |
on Couplets: A Love Story, a novel in verse by Maggie Millner
“There’s less of an intention to reclaim the beauty of older forms and more that there was no other form appropriate to give a voice to her speaker.”
Commentary |
Evil Flowers, stories by Gunnhild Øyehaug, translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson
“The prevailing mood is one of a heartfelt desire to press at the edges of story, to acknowledge our self-cancelling urges as readers.”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Previously Owned, poems by Nathan McClain & Marina Tsvetaeva: To Die in Yelabuga by Vénus Khoury-Ghata, translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan
“The severities he names or alludes to are made approachable, visible, audible through his pensive, companionable tone – without minimizing the endurance of those severities.”
Commentary |
on Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory by Janet Malcolm
“Always suspicious of her own responses but confident in her questions, Malcolm writes, ‘The past is a country that issues no visas. We can only enter it illegally.'”
Commentary |
on The Missing Jew: Poems 1976-2022 by Rodger Kamenetz, Selected Poems 1980-2020 by Rachel Blau DuPlessis & Collected Poems by Gary Snyder
“Their poetry leaps on us and continues to do so, calling upon us to to think anew. These three poets are, in different ways, each interested in turning our attention to the mystery of this world and to the complex paths of being more than oneself.”
Commentary |
on The 12th Commandment, a novel by Daniel Torday
“Eager to graduate from associate editor to writing for a living, Zeke is drawn toward the charismatic Nathan Fritzman and his Dönme congregation. He pitches the story to his editor and starts to investigate.”
Commentary |
on Motherfield, protest diary and poetry by Julia Cimafiejeva, translated from Belarusian by Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib
“She is opening an alternate Belarusian canon, a literary tradition capable of speaking to the anxieties and agonies of living in Lukashenko’s Belarus.”
Commentary |
on The Naked World: A Tale with Verse by Irina Mashinski
“This tale, with verse, is a harrowing and cautionary primer in how the legacy of government-sanctioned tragedy is created and persists …”
Commentary |
on Interventions for Women, poems by Angela Hume
“Hume’s Midwest is a porous and at times violent entity which she confronts through a lyrical documentary poetics that generates urgent, startling questions.”
Commentary |
on Extreme Music: From Silence to Noise and Everything in Between by Michael Tau
“Part of the appeal of Tau’s book is that it thoughtfully and thoroughly sorts through so much weirdness. Ultra-fast techno. Compositions meant to play for a thousand years, or for one second.”
Commentary |
on Jersey Breaks: Becoming an American Poet, a memoir by Robert Pinsky & American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide by Susan Barba
“ ‘I am an expert at nothing except the sounds of sentences in the English language,’ he says. Sound here is attitude, and certain attitudes are preferred. Sound is also the noise the mind makes when it leaps.”
Commentary |
on Again, the Dawn: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2022 by Grace Schulman
” ‘Art does not ask fidelity to life,’ Schulman will later write, ‘but ardent precision,’ a form of observation derived from Marianne Moore, whom the young Schulman knew.”
Commentary |
on New Selected Poetry Collections by Norman Fischer and Rachel Blau DuPlessis
“Fischer and DuPlessis are poets of our time who chronicle our bad history, our worries, our difficult labors. If our time is ruin, to rehearse DuPlessis, it’s been constructed by us. Next up: rebirth?”