Commentary |
on Underworld Lit, a serial prose poem by Srikanth Reddy
“A realm that spans prose and poetry, asking for pause amid the momentum of plot to consider national devastation and nuclear family; things loved, lost, or bought; language borrowed, revived, translated.”
Essay |
“Confessions of a Pareidoliac”
“Imagine trying to find your way with a compass that wants every direction to be north. This is more or less where we are, perceiving the world around us by means of instruments that find patterns everywhere.”
Commentary |
on Great Demon Kings, a memoir by John Giorno
“… a memoir, most of all, about craving connection in all its forms — noble, ugly, and in-between. Networking, friendship, publicity, audience-building, status-seeking, fucking.”
Commentary |
on Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb by Kenneth Goldsmith
“Culture survives both on the backs of compensated creators and the desire to share. Figuring out that balance has been a challenge for arts and publishing for ages.”
Interview |
“Don’t Disturb This Groove”: A Conversation with Major Jackson
“I often seek metaphorical language that could open up possibilities of understanding my nature, all the suffering as well as the ecstatic. That search becomes a singular obsession, for it is where readers experience eternity, where mysteries are revealed.”
Commentary |
on In Praise of Fragments, poetry by Meena Alexander
“Fragments of memory, of place, of home and the meaning of home, of mother and grandmother and the generations of women connected through blood and literature: ‘She is a bitter crystal that never shatters.'”
Commentary |
on American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise by Eduardo Porter
Porter asserts, “The America that built the most prosperous working class the world had ever seen collapsed into a heap of pathologies simply due to a lack of empathy.”
Commentary |
Out of Silences: on Nervous System by Rosalie Moffett and Post & Rail by Erica Funkhouser
“These two stirring collections show us that, faced with silence, uncertainty, and unfathomability, poets are often born — in part from the need, in Funkhouser’s words, ‘to supply the words themselves.'”
Essay |
“December”
“Books don’t prepare you for what’s coming. Manuals for pregnant women must have been written by mothers completely drugged by love for their children, without the slightest pinch of critical distance.”
Essay |
“With This Needle I Thee Mend: The Oldest Tool Still Used”
“Hanging by a thread, we have kept our secret weapons, our needles, and brought them along for millennia.”
Essay |
“Friendship on the Page”
“… the continuous intertwined narrative of a reciprocal exchange between just two correspondents … I found exactly that in the correspondence between William Maxwell and Eudora Welty.”
Fiction |
“Lluvia Sin Agua”
“There was a rumor that today at five the camion-cisterna would return to their barrio. The big truck that sells water to the areas outside of the city that don’t have a water system. Ever since the water shortage started, the trucks came to el barrio less and less, until eventually it was just once a week.”
Essay |
“Diversity: A Garden Allegory”
“The covenant for our homeowners association specifies that what I’ve done around my house is technically prohibited. There should be fewer wildflowers in my yard. Banish the milkweed.”
Essay |
“Metaphor As Illness”
“Illness is obscene in its reality. No wonder we hurry to clothe it in metaphor, to drape it in wooly lengths of symbolism.”
Commentary |
“Poets Recommend” / Part One
In the first of four April installments of “Poets Recommend,” we comment on new collections by Aaron Smith, Tommye Blount, and Fiona Benson