Interviews

Second Looks |March 11, 2025

“Alexandrian Delights: Rereading Cavafy”

an essay by Christoph Irmscher

“Constantine Cavafy, a half-closeted gay man, and Ida von Pechmann, a matronly housewife from Bavaria half-adjusted to Alexandrian society, had little in common except for the fact that they lived and wrote in the same place.”
Commentary |March 11, 2025

on Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe by Carl Zimmer

reviewed by Hamilton Cain

“The book’s most trenchant theme: science is shaped and driven by the political and cultural values of the individuals and institutions that fund investigations, whether private endowments or the federal government.”
Commentary |March 11, 2025

Book Notes: on Serendipity by Carol Mavor, A Woman I Once Knew by Rosalind Fox Solomon, Gliff by Ali Smith & Your Steps on the Stairs by Antonio Muñoz Molino

comments by Ron Slate

“Interactions, small gestures, and supposition attain sharp profiles in contrast to the dystopian surround. Rescuing language from its servile usages is Gliff’s essential occurrence.”
Commentary |March 11, 2025

on Nevermore by Cécile Wajsbrot, translated from the French by Tess Lewis

reviewed by Elizabeth Tucker

“Nevermore is a … record of the act of translation as an all-consuming thought process … Wajsbrot could not have created such a complete account of a translator’s experience without having herself translated Woolf’s The Waves …”

Interviews

Interview |February 4, 2019

“The Mystery of Persistence” // a Conversation About Poetry with G. C. Waldrep, curated by Victoria Chang

“When I was at Iowa in the MFA program, I was surprised by how many of my peers weren’t waiting to be astonished. As readers, they went to literature for something else.”

Interview |January 11, 2009

An Interview with George Hochfield, co-translator of Songbook, The Selected Poems of Umberto Saba

interviewed by Ron Slate