Commentary |
Constellating the “Once”: on The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems by Arthur Sze
“Sze continues to ponder the role of sentience in comprehending and translating the prismatic and generative paradoxes of the world …”
Commentary |
“Poets Recommend” — Part I
In the first of several installments of this annual feature, we comment on recent collections by Khaled Mattawa, Rachel Long, and Kimiko Hahn
Commentary |
on Piñata Theory, poems by Alan Chazaro & An Incomplete List of Names, poems by Michael Torres
“The new generation of Chicano poets is negotiating themes such as identity and masculinity but through a millennial lens — fully aware of the challenges in their communities, but whose consciousness has been shaped by the previous generation’s successes and shortcomings.”
Commentary |
on The Earliest Witnesses, poems by G.C. Waldrep
“Waldrep does not let the sorrows and pain that both attend and define this book — the sicknesses, the surgeries, the omnipresence of war, the loneliness of the ‘tourist’ — have the final say … The Earliest Witnesses chooses clarity — which, in this case, means faith.”
Commentary |
on Zorrie, a novel by Laird Hunt
“The meditative, eerie, and beautiful Zorrie is a journey story — but Hunt tinkers with our expectations, turning it from an adventure tale into an elliptical, more questioning book about why we move in the first place.”
Essay |
“The Coffee Klatsch,” “The Long Ride Home,” “Timeshare” and “Breathing Lessons”
“… and I’d have this nearly imperceptible fantasy while stirring the Sweet & Low into the matcha that I would cause an explosion, that our little corner of Brooklyn would suddenly burst into flames …”
Commentary |
on The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, a novel by Gina Apostol
“The novel’s core document is a memoir of the Philippine revolution against Spanish colonizers written by Mata, a man nearing blindness … juvenalia, letters from family, travel chronicles, dossiers of revolutionaries …”
Poetry |
“October 6, 2016,” “October 30, 2016,” “[unsent draft]” and “March 1, 2017”
“A man I once loved said forgive me each time he committed even the smallest transgression. / He’d drink the last beer in the fridge and say forgive me as he lowered his body to mine on the couch.”
Text and Image |
“The Silence Is Still In Me”: Covid ICU Images
“I admit that I agonized for 24 hours before deciding to accept the assignment. Ultimately, I knew that I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t take those pictures.”
Poetry |
from “The Ruins of Nostalgia”
“We were wise to flattery, to certainty, to historicity, but we lay down our burdens for all of them. We were wise to ourselves, in every sense. We were wise to hearts, candy or otherwise.”
Commentary |
on After The Body: Poems New and Selected by Cleopatra Mathis
“Mathis grows impatient with the blandishments of her generation’s period style, with its hushed refinements and scrupulously crafted metaphors, and seeks an edgier sort of utterance.”
Interview |
A Conversation with Juan Felipe Herrera
“One of the first songs I learned was ‘Contraband de El Paso.’ It’s about being picked up by border patrol and taken to Leavenworth. I used to sing that when I was a child.”
Commentary |
on Election Eve, photographs by William Eggleston
“Critics eagerly pounced on Eggleston — but he became a major artist all the same because his images’ snapshot-like simplicity belied something more complex and discomfiting.”
Commentary |
on Exposition, Suite for Barbara Loden and The White Dress, nonfiction by Nathalie Léger
“I can’t think of another project that so radically captures the self-consciousness of womanhood, the nature of being watched, judged — the artist losing control of the frame, and then somehow reclaiming it.”
Commentary |
on Jill Osier’s The Solace Is Not the Lullaby, Kiki Petrosino’s White Blood & Alice Oswald’s Nobody
“Whereas Petrosino writes into a past whose violence threatens to overtake the present at every line break — and whereas Osier examines her own memories with a trained eye — Alice Oswald looks back even farther.”