Commentary |
Book Notes: on Random Access, photographs by John T. Hill, They Called It Peace by Lauren Benton, The Work of Art by Adam Moss & Cataract by John Berger
“John co-edited The Photographs of W. Eugene Smith and inscribed the copy he gave to me, writing, ‘Ron. Remember Mr. Smith’s advice – manipulation is necessary to get to the truth – or something like that.'”
Commentary |
on Promises of Gold, poems by José Olivarez
“Each poem enacts a mind that moves fluidly and fast, that can delight in play in the same moment it registers anger, or disappointment, or disdain, and that doesn’t need to take itself seriously to say something serious.”
Commentary |
on The Lily in the Valley, a novel by Honoré de Balzac, in a new translation by Peter Bush & Geoffrey O’Brien
“… a novel that repurposes and modifies tropes to dramatize unconscious drives, the complex interplay of domination and submission, repression, and sublimation, set against the Bourbon Restoration.”
Commentary |
on The Invention of the Darling, poems by Li Young Lee
“The collection enacts a return – a volta – from the isolationist and consumptive tendencies of the self and towards the omnific, agape love of the divine.”
Commentary |
on A Word or Two Before I Go: Essays Then and Now & Some Unfinished Business: The Lives of F. Scott Fitzgerald by Arthur Krystal
“He’s an amateur in the etymological sense … simultaneously a throwback and ‘post-‘ everything, and mourns the passing of culture while resisting self-pity.”
Commentary |
Outlasting Wreck and Ruin: A Pilgrim’s Progress in Heather Treseler’s Auguries & Divinations
“… myths of femininity and sexuality, carceral impediment, empire, labor, suburban (and other domestically and culturally prescribed) exigencies, fertility, and the ‘magical thinking’ by which women can grow into themselves despite systematic obstacles.”
Commentary |
on Phantom Pain Wings, poems by Kim Hyesoon
“Written after the death of Kim’s actual father, followed ‘three months and ten days later’ by her mother, Phantom Pain Wings delineates a terminal world where existence continues despite the absence of everything.”
Commentary |
on The Art of Dying: Writings 2019-2022 by Peter Schjeldahl
“Schjeldahl, for the benefit of his devoted audience, demystified both art and writing about art. ‘Each of us,’ he commented in 2004, after visiting a Vermeer exhibit, ‘is born with a capacity to see and feel intensely and with precision.'”
Commentary |
on Life on Earth, poems by Dorianne Laux
“Laux sees into yet unperceived life within our relationships with products, inventions, and pop culture, as well as the flexible boundaries we share with myth, poetry, and the unwitnessed aspects of our own lives.”
Commentary |
on The Silver Bone, a novel by Andrey Kurkov, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk
“A retro detective novel suggests a historical mystery, set in a particular period that provides a distinctive backdrop to the action … but Kurkov undercuts the expectation that the detective plot must be the central element in a detective novel.”
Commentary |
on The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War by James Shapiro
“For Shapiro, the four-year career of the Federal Theater is no mere footnote to history but rather a link in a chain of movements that reveal the complexity and contradictions of the American Experiment, whose triumphs are often tenuous.”
Commentary |
on My First Book, stories by Honor Levy
“She lays bare everything that is shameful, embarrassing, and frightening about Gen Z. This isn’t the generation of Greta Thunberg, Amanda Gorman, or Emma Gonzalez. This is the generation that profits off vanity, scrolls after sex, and thinks ‘cutting is healthier than Xanax.'”
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.”