Commentary

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.”

Commentary |

on The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry by Stacey D’Erasmo

“an extended inquiry into how a wide range of artists have managed to sustain their vision — how they’ve kept their other eyes open throughout the length of their artistic careers.”

Commentary |

on Here After, a memoir by Amy Lin

“She is no longer able to sleep, work as a teacher, laugh genuinely, attend to others, or imagine any kind of viable future. She quickly discovers that people are terrified of her suffering — even when she attempts to demonstrate what she calls ‘Good Signs’.”

Commentary |

on Canandaigua, poems by Donald Revell

“The compelling combination of familiarity and deep mystery stems from the varied ways Revell discovers to bring these essential concerns into continually awakening conversations with one another.”

Commentary |

on Exploding Head, poems by Cynthia Marie Hoffman

“Disinterested in portraying a universal experience of obsessive compulsive disorder, Exploding Head is a rich and sensory depiction of a life experienced beyond and outside of diagnosis, entrenched in personal experience.”

Commentary |

on Concerning the Future of Souls, stories by Joy Williams

“Williams’ trademark humor and dry wit persist. Yet a darkness also materializes on nearly every page, mostly in the suggestion that humanity has pushed Earth beyond its breaking point.”