Author Archive
Songwriting and Poetry in Sadie Dupuis’s Cry Perfume
Sadie Dupuis’s poems read like they would make interesting songs. These would be songs not of the finger-picked, delicately confessional coffee-house sort, though, but of the spikily asymmetrical, disjunctive sort, with guitar solos that sound like automobile accidents.
The Peculiar Ritual of Poetry Readings in Douglas Kearney’s Optic Subwoof
By looking at the institution of poetry readings, the peculiar ritual in which the poet is both the priest and the sacrifice, Kearney goes where other writers should follow.
Prince and the Remaking of Image in Hilton Als’s My Pinup
Who could be a better guide to Prince—to his polymorphous sexuality, his gleeful dismantling of the racial compartmentalization of American popular music, his seemingly effortless sprezzatura as a performer—than Hilton Als?
The Body Family’s Sharp and Intimate Portrayal of Trauma
Here we have trauma in its contradictory particularity, its incalculable aleatory combinations—not flattened or reduced at all, but sharp, salient, and intimate.
Inheriting Trauma in How to Not Be Afraid of Everything
Jane Wong’s new poetry collection suggests that historical trauma does not evaporate between generations—its traces leak into the bones of the children, and even of the grandchildren . . . A triumph of formal ingenuity.
Jack by Marilynne Robinson
Robinson’s novels are like glaciers. They move slowly, but they leave behind a transformed landscape. In the vast and complex landscape of American novel-writing, Marilynne Robinson’s is a unique and indispensable terrain.
Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition by Lisa Fishman
Lisa Fishman’s new collection is an honest and ongoing wrestling with the vocation of poetry itself.
Obit by Victoria Chang
The emotional power of Chang’s new collection comes from the grace and honesty with which she turns this familiar form inside out to show us the private side of family, the knotting together of generations, the bewilderment of grief.
Frolic and Detour by Paul Muldoon
Like Ashbery in his final collections, or Cohen in his final albums, Paul Muldoon has nothing left to prove, and can take delight simply in doing what he inimitably does. And his delight is ours.
Review: ON WALKING ON by Cole Swensen
Imagine an anthology of the literature of walking, with examples ranging from the Middle Ages to the present. Now imagine a book containing only commentaries on these ruminations on walking, without the accompaniment of the texts that inspired them.