Commentary |
on The Sorrow Apartments, poems by Andrea Cohen
“… varying her tone between heartbreaking and humorous, the words of each line a whiplash against what follows, often pitted against the speed of technology, text, and error in the world of the 21st century …”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Fog and Smoke, poems by Katie Peterson – Forgotten on Sunday, a novel by Valérie Perrin — & In the Shadow of Fear, nonfiction by Nick Bunker
“In Katie Peterson’s Fog and Smoke, every search for clarity and connections must proceed through the full awareness of what constrains us … both the poet and the reader must submit to assessment.”
Commentary |
on The Uptown Local: Joy, Death and Joan Didion, a memoir by Cory Leadbeater
“The book is reserved when it comes to details about Didion’s life, and he shares even less about her as a writer — Leadbeater assumes we know much of that. But he has a lot to say about class, keeping up appearances, and how grinding those divisions can be.”
Commentary |
on What Kingdom, a novel by Fine Gråbøl, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken
“The novel relies far less on plot than even the most literary of novels, concentrating instead on relationships between characters and the blurring of roles at a psychiatric care home … an honest look at life in recovery, guiding readers through everyday transgressions with an astute eye.”
Commentary |
Book Notes on Music: Billie Holiday’s Last Year — The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins — Women in Alternative Music — Miles Davis, Bill Evans, John Coltrane & Kind of Blue
“Holiday’s habits comprised a magnificent defiance of the inevitable, whether the punishments were imposed by the FBI, the news media, abusive men and greedy managers, or pushers.”
Commentary |
on I Tell You This Now, poems by Daniel Lawless
“… a style of hectic velocities, sudden swerves, rash u-turns, and sometimes abrupt dead ends, all pointing toward a truth about psychological damage.”
Commentary |
on Ward Toward, poems by Cindy Juyoung Ok
“Ok uses the various meanings of ‘ward’ to tell a story of identity and immigration, violence and mental illness, shared trauma and lonely isolation.”
Commentary |
on The Holocaust: An Unfinished History by Dan Stone
“Stone warns that the only thing the Holocaust teaches is that ‘deep passions that owe nothing to rational politics can move human beings to do terrible things,’ adding that the upshot is that the Holocaust can teach us nothing ‘since nothing in the end can stop people from supporting these dark forces in times of crisis.'”
Commentary |
on EtC, poems by Laura Mullen
“Dairies brand their cows, ad agencies brand companies, academics brand themselves. Mullen writes of calves being flayed: ‘they / Spoke only between cries / Of pain of their brand / How to use their youth and / Beauty to sell their books.’ Cows metamorphose into women academics in this dream.”
Commentary |
on The Wet Wound: An Elegy in Essays by Maddie Norris
“She recognizes how distant the father and daughter were in life, and that distance may be crossed only through imagining and an acceptance of the unknown …”
Commentary |
on The Extinction of Irena Rey, a novel by Jennifer Croft
“Weaving our ecological woes among ancient myths, she nestles the whole lot into a timely saga of translation … embedded in a crafty mystery story. Or is it?”
Commentary |
on The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of The Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture by Tricia Romano
“Their critics weren’t afraid to say what they thought. They wrote the way my friends and I talked about the books we read. And they picked titles that weren’t stacked on the tables in Barnes & Noble.”
Commentary |
on The Life of Tu Fu by Eliot Weinberger
“His remix of Du Fu’s work transports us beyond the boundaries of individual poems and, as far as that might be possible, into the mind that produced these poems … [he is] adamant that his book be taken not as a translation but, instead, as Du Fu’s ‘fictional autobiography.'”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Trace Evidence, poems by Charif Shanahan — On Giving Up, essays by Adam Phillips — & Tell, a novel by Jonathan Buckley
“Trace Evidence is a beginning that claims no destination, no goal. The destination is unlanguaged. These are poems that appear to have emerged not from a comprehensible ‘I’ but from the disruptions and retardations of the world at large.”
Commentary |
on Wandering Stars, a novel by Tommy Orange
“He pinches grammar and syntax, tweaks switchbacks and inversions, unrolls single-sentence paragraphs with cadences like drum beats. It’s this formal inventiveness that may be the novel’s master stroke.”