Commentary |
on Every Day the River Changes: A Journey Down the Magdalena by Jordan Salama
“The dead arrived by river: people who had been murdered somewhere upstream and were ‘discarded in death, dumped into the Magdalena, and carried away by the current’ past Colombia’s riverside towns and villages …”
Commentary |
on American Bastard, a memoir by Jan Beatty
“Research shows that the separation of infants from their biological mothers can cause changes in brain chemistry and a failure to thrive. Babies born in hospitals are no longer separated from their mothers as they were in the 20th century when doctors viewed infants as blank slates who had no attachments or emotional vulnerabilities.”
Commentary |
on Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon by Mark McGurl
“Because Amazon is concerned about customer satisfaction first and foremost, the company has reframed the novel as, McGurl writes, ‘an existential scaling device, a tool for adjusting our emotional states toward the desired end of happiness, however complex or simple a state it might be.'”
Essay |
“Robert Desnos in the Desert”
“This is impossible, but Desnos is standing on the Mexican side of the Stanton Street Bridge, facing downtown El Paso. He is waiting for me to close the distance from one side of the international border to the other.”
Essay |
“Æ, the Letter Ash”
“The æsc (ash) tree was felled for spear handles, tablets, charcoal, bedframes, wagon wheels, oars — perhaps this is why the author of the Old English “Rune Poem” in the eighth century observes that the æsc is precious, although many men attack it.“
Commentary |
on Hao: Stories by Ye Chun
“The new book deepens especially into the terrain of mothers and their offspring, and into the challenges of protecting and nurturing children in circumstances imperiled by abandonment, racism, poverty and violence.”
Commentary |
on Ghosts • City • Sea, poems by Wang Yin 王寅, translated by Andrea Lingenfelter
“… a chronicle and commitment to uninterrupted labor, a reaction to the haunted world that persists through stages: a struggle to overcome, a struggle for equilibrium and healing, and the dogged pursuit of joy.”
Commentary |
on Last Summer in the City, a novel by Gianfranco Calligarich, translated by Howard Curtis
“… ultimately a melancholy novel, but one with a peculiar brightness. It makes a retreat from the world feel charming — that there’s a way out from the stress of the world, until, alas, there isn’t.”
Commentary |
on Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, edited by Michael Duncan
“The artists were united in their desire to depict another world, one indescribable via traditional western pictorial means. They would instead utilize form, color and distilled feeling to describe the spiritual world as they perceived it.”
Commentary |
on The Monster I Am Today: Leontyne Price and a Life in Verse by Kevin Simmonds
“Simmonds looked to Price for inspiration since she had already broken the race barrier. He also clung to the wisdom of his early singing teachers, who were Black and had cautioned him, ‘Don’t let them change your voice. It’s a naturally dark sound. Like Price.'”
Commentary |
on Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001–2021 by Yusef Komunyakaa
“A bracing range of interrelated subjects, which often change register and perspective not just between pages but between sentences — much as what is in one’s brain can change from second to second.”
Essay |
on “Poems Not Written” — a recurring feature On The Seawall
“A poet’s job, if we can call it a job, is not to be a stenographer, recording in blunt shorthand terrible moments … so culpability might be determined. A poet’s job is to remind us of the networks along which feeling — traumatic and otherwise — travels and oftentimes warps: cellular, familial, temporal, sociocultural, historical.”
Commentary |
on Gallery of Clouds, hybrid nonfiction by Rachel Eisendrath
“Fiction ‘never lieth,’ Sidney wrote, because it never presumed to tell the truth. Yet we crave the fiction that fiction promises. If we can’t wholly inhabit fiction, Eisendrath asks, how do we live with it?”
Commentary |
on The Selected Letters of John Berryman, edited by Philip Coleman and Calista McRae
“A lively, expansive portrait of a brilliant, ambitious, difficult, and deeply troubled man, along with a wealth of information for anyone interested in this polarizing poet’s life and work … and a revealing window onto the dynamics of the mid-20th century literary world.”
Essay |
“The Mariner” and “Mauve”: from Plastic: An Autobiography
“He underestimated desire, the frenzy of passion for the glittering Empress in her cage of color. Perkin had found the first product with global demand to be made from coal tar. His discovery opened the way for drugs, fertilizers, and plastic …”