Text and Image |
“The Unfinishing: My Photographs of Alex”
“I remember feeling compelled to keep shooting, and I did so every day. It was as if I had just been skimming the surface of things until I lived on his land.”
Commentary |
Resisting Translation: on Pale Colors In A Tall Field, poems by Carl Phillips
“Poems so intricately paid out — in suspensions, eddies, asides, interruptions, questions, suddenly opened fields, and tidal pools of perception — that time disappears into mind, mind into body. Sentence into sentience.”
Essay |
Life’s Work: on the Poetry of Jane Mead
“Jane Mead brought her five books of poetry and 14 new poems into To the Wren: Collected & New Poems, 1991-2019. She died less than a month after its publication.”
Interview |
A Conversation with Lydia Davis
“For a long time, Grace Paley’s approach was my model: politics, family, and friendships first — and writing second. I may have that wrong, or may be idealizing, but that seems to me at the moment a good balance.”
Commentary |
on Survival is a Style, poems by Christian Wiman
“Wiman refuses despair — though, like Job, he has many reasons to embrace it. Nor is the hope he chooses naïve; like joy, it’s a hope that affirms the reality of suffering.”
Fiction |
“At The Last”
“‘I don’t want to be married anymore.’ Is that how he said it? Or was it the harder, the more particular, ‘I don’t want to be married to you anymore’? He doesn’t remember.”
Poetry |
Five Poems by Sergei Yesenin
“Yesenin called himself ‘the last poet of the village,’ both in the sense of his peasant origins and of being the last poet of his contemporaries concerned with country life …”
Commentary |
on Inside the Critics’ Circle by Phillipa K. Chong
“Many interviewees said they weren’t sure they ‘counted’ as a critic because they don’t self-identify as one. They often write less out of a sense of journalistic public service and more to reinforce their professional standing elsewhere.”
Poetry |
Selections from études
Essay |
“Russian Lines and American Lines: Traveling America with Sergey Gandlevsky”
“The name Gandlevsky comes from the Ukrainian word meaning revenue or earnings. They must have been peddlers of some sort. ‘Do you know what this means?’ he explained. ‘I was born to be a charlatan!'”
Commentary |
Singing the Unsun: on Andrew Zawacki’s Unsun: f/11
“Even as old gestures of the pastoral must be reprised and revised, what is possible, if nothing else, is a singing of the undone.”
Commentary |
on This Woman’s Work by Julie Delporte and How I Tried To Be A Good Person by Ulli Lust
“How do you draw the feeling of being unable to draw? The question is a driving force behind these graphic memoirs that reckon with disruption — jobs, needy men, motherhood”
Commentary |
on The Heart Is A Full-Wild Beast, stories by John L’Heureux
“Since the actions of faith tend to produce faith, L’Heureux insists, we must be careful where we bestow them.”
Commentary |
on A Theory of Birds, poems by Zaina Alsous
“The story of exile is fundamentally an erotic story, about loss and longing — and therefore, the poetics of unattainability is seductive for outsiders but useless for the people living in it.”
Commentary |
on Essays: One by Lydia Davis
“Davis’ writing on writing possesses a candor and warmth that are rare in the genre, even while she demands an unusual amount of rigor.”