Commentary |
on Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir by Vidyan Ravinthiran
“Ravinthiran offers us another metaphor of selfhood, and a new kind of autobiography, one for a late capitalist world in which we must think of global priorities and of selves that exceed national borders.”
Commentary |
Book Notes: Novels — on I’ll Come To You by Rebecca Kauffman, Paradise Close by Lisa Russ Spaar & Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato
“I’ll Come To You is a record of how Kauffman enacted her approach to a mystery – what do people actually want from each other, and what gets in the way of providing or receiving it?”
Commentary |
on Past Lives, poems by V. Joshua Adams
“When the ‘I’ appears in Adams’ poems, it’s not to offer the stamp of emotional authenticity, but to take advantage of the many masks that a skilled raconteur can adopt.”
Commentary |
on Poems That Dance and A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye by V. Penelope Pelizzon
“We talk about art embodying ideas and feelings, but I think it’s worth talking about poems — some poems, at least — as bodies unto themselves, bodies a mind can make …”
Commentary |
Book Notes, Nonfiction: on The Cities We Need by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, What Nails It by Greil Marcus, The Picture Not Taken by Benjamin Swett & The Age of Reconstruction by Don H. Doyle
“She observes neighborhood life and the diverse work of housing activists, artists, community gardeners, small business owners who stimulate our thinking about and cultivate the gratifications of dailiness.”
Commentary |
on The Widow’s Crayon Box, poems by Molly Peacock
“As much as this collection reflects upon lives shared over decades past, it also looks forward with curiosity, understanding that the ‘scent of lost affection, / is what gives loneliness its worth.'”
Commentary |
on The Burrow, a novel by Melanie Cheng
“Cheng unveils the devastating consequences of grief on a family in the Australian suburbs during the Covid pandemic … a nuanced exploration of family dynamics amidst loss and the enduring power of hope.”
Commentary |
on The Lady of the Mine, a novel by Sergei Lebedev, translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis
“A washer woman dies in a mining village in the Donbas, Ukraine in July of 2014, and two days later a foreign passenger jet is blown out of the sky. In the novel’s mystical world, these seemingly unrelated events acquire the force of world-shattering causality.”
Commentary |
on An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth, a novel by Anna Moschovakis
“The pleasure of the novel derives from its tension between the narrator’s urge to organize — she makes lists, fills notebooks, takes classes — set against Moschovakis’ determination to question the meaning of that organization, to mess with language and existence.”
Commentary |
on Candy, poems by Dan Albergotti
“The ghost of Hamlet and Keats’s living hand steer Albergotti through a world at risk, its chaos echoed in the play between established forms and rougher music.”
Commentary |
on Becoming Little Shell, a memoir by Chris La Tray
“Immersion in the history of his tribe and its struggles helped La Tray understand his father’s rejection of heritage as a self-protective strategy, a shame response, and a way of protecting his children.”
Commentary |
on Creature, poems by Michael Dumanis
“I am hard-pressed to think of another contemporary poet who incorporates both contemporary and ancient sensibility so memorably in poetry that resonates as post postmodern and mythological, both comedic and highly serious.”
Commentary |
on An Image of My Name Enters America, essays by Lucy Ives
“If there is a throughline connecting these five investigations — of what we know and how we know it — it is what underlies all realizations: that what we are told is often a painful lie.”
Commentary |
Book Notes, Nonfiction: The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie & A Day in September by Stephen Budiansky
“The year 2003 was a challenging one for Ernaux. The previous October, she had been diagnosed with breast cancer; in January, her infusions began, which coincided with the first of the photographs.”
Commentary |
on St. Matthew Passion by Gjertrud Schnackenberg
“Schnackenberg breaks a fourteen-year silence with a paean to sound: the collection does not so much meditate on Bach’s sacred oratorio as levitate from it.”