Commentary |
Book Notes, Nonfiction: on The Age of Loneliness by Laura Marris, Mortevivum by Kimberly Juanita Brown, Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh & Hitler’s People by Richard J. Evans
“When violence occurs and people are killed, injured and distressed, what do we want or expect to see? What does the ‘high tolerance for black death’ say about our media?”
Commentary |
on Grief’s Alphabet, poetry by Carrie Etter
“Grief may give Etter her alphabet — grief in particular over her mother’s death — but with formal virtuosity that seems almost effortless and improvisatory, Etter makes out of that alphabet a book of deeply moving poems.”
Commentary |
on Mothersland, a novel by Shahzoda Samarqandi, translated from the Russian by Shelley Fairweather-Vega
“Samarqandi asserted in a radio interview that ‘Tajik women need to learn to express their opinion freely, to be able to say what they like and what they don’t like, starting from a very young age. They need to know their rights, that they are free to choose who to be friends with, who to start a family with.'”
Commentary |
on Cloud Missives, poetry by Kenzie Allen
“Allen’s collection seeks to calibrate an audience attuned to irony and misinformation, a correction that’s necessary before she can say anything in earnest. In doing so, she also resists the eurocentric demand to explain Oneida culture …”
Commentary |
Book Notes: The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş & Overstaying by Ariane Koch, translated from the German by Damion Searls
“In abandoning some of the market’s rules of fiction – Savaş invites us to experience the renewable rules of expression — the old ways of being new — that are in play when an artist is performing at the sublime height of her art.”
Commentary |
on Mina’s Matchbox, a novel by Yoko Ozawa, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder
“Ogawa beautifully captures the intricate emotions of a child who desperately wants to belong. And how relatively short intervals of our childhood can take on an outsized significance.z’
Commentary |
on Go Figure, poems by Rae Armantrout
“The poet’s latest collection is rich with allusions to the climate crisis, artificial intelligence, and other man-made dangers. Such themes pair well with Armantrout’s iconic version of Language poetry and her interest in quantum physics.”
Commentary |
on What I Know About You, a novel by Éric Chacour, translated from the French by Pablo Strauss
“From the bustling streets of Cairo to the quiet solitude of Montreal, this novel is a sweeping saga of family secrets, cultural clashes, and the sacrifices made in the name of love.”
Commentary |
on Life After Kafka, a novel by Magdaléna Platzová, translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker
“The couple’s relationship was mostly an epistolatory one – except for a brief vacation together in the spa town of Marienbad – and is buoyed by the 600 letters and postcards that Kafka wrote to Felice.”
Commentary |
on Ice, poems by David Keplinger
“An homage to fragmented forms of ancients solidified in ice and lost to the living world, a requiem. At the same time, the poetry retains the elegiac dimensions of his personal losses.”
Commentary |
on Question 7, a novel by Richard Flanagan
“Memoir, fiction, criticism, political punditry, a pinch of travelogue: Flanagan sees a mash-up of genres as the form perfectly tailored to our mashed-up era — history as theater of the absurd.”
Commentary |
on The Material, a novel by Camille Bordas
“Her surprising premise fuses, and neutralizes, two hack expectations: that MFA students tend not to be great at taking jokes, and that comedians tend not to be great at taking criticism.”
Commentary |
on Van Gogh and the End of Nature by Michael Lobel
“There’s a dialectic between planting scenes in Arles, emblematized by figures of plowmen and a Sower, and smoke-capped townscapes in the background, teeming with chimneys …”
Commentary |
on The Caricaturist, a novel by Norman Lock
“The events of The Caricaturist are framed by the jingoism that attended the United States’ imperial ambitions generally and the Spanish-American War in particular.”
Commentary |
on Proverbs of Limbo, poems by Robert Pinsky
“Pinsky is our great poet of ambivalence, who asks: how can an artist participate in a culture so hostile to that artist’s existence? And yet, to be dispossessed is to lay claim to all.”