Book Reviews Archive

THE NEUTRAL CORNER: Michael Hofmann’s “Where Have You Been?” And Gottfried Benn’s “Impromptus”

The neutral corner is one of the two corners of the ring not used by boxers between rounds. It is also the corner a boxer must retreat to after he has floored his opponent. The Neutral Corner was also a bar in Saratoga Springs, New York, that I frequented

Review: THE PAPER MAN by Gallagher Lawson

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The Paper Man Gallagher Lawson Published: May 12, 2015 Unnamed Press 261 pages Buy: book   A man with a papier mâché body and hair made of yarn attempts to break out of his protected, isolated, and stagnant life and escape to an unnamed city. On the bus, a

Review: GUTSHOT by Amelia Gray

Gutshot Amelia Gray FSG Originals Published: 4/14/15 224 pages $14.00 If Amelia Gray’s collection, Gutshot, was choreography, it would be comprised of violent, animalistic phrases: bodies smashing into each other and hands clawing into skin. But on the page, these assembled short stories use a vocabulary of the body

When We Are Given a Feast of Flesh

How do I remember spaces? Bedrooms, beaches, backseats, bazaars. The time between dreams. Night. The no-man’s land of a twelve-hour flight. I remember the world as words. I spent my last few weeks in Delhi hunting for books. For relatives, for friends, but, finally, for my own sake: to

Review: Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism

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Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism Walter LaFeber W.W. Norton, 1999 191 Pages Buy: book | ebook It doesn’t take very long for a revolution to seem quaint. In 1999, the year that Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism was published by Cornell Professor Emeritus of history

Blood Memory

“There is only one of you in all time; this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.”—Martha Graham Dance was my first foray into art, and I studied it for sixteen years with the kind

The Summer of Salinger, A Review

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My Salinger Year Joanna Rakoff 272 pages Knopf $25.95 buy: here J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist Thomas Beller 192 Pages Icons Series, New Harvest $20 buy: here   As a boy in Manhattan, Thomas Beller frequented the Museum of Natural History, struggled with his Jewish identity and didn’t apply

Naming as Paying Attention

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Names can be hard for the tongue to wrap its head around. I say this with the conviction of my full being as a male, a poet, a twin, and a slight stutterer. (Of course I stutter. My brother and I lived our early lives assuming that the world,

Review: TWENTY THOUSAND PIGEONS by Justin Bigos

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Twenty Thousand Pigeons Justin Bigos iO Press, 2014 1st edition sold out; inquire here When I think of twenty thousand pigeons, I think of Disney vacations and city park picnics from childhood—precious memories ruined by grey birds pooping in my hair and stealing my French fries. But when I

Review: Zen Bow, Zen Arrow by John Stevens

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Zen Bow, Zen Arrow: The Life and Teachings of Awa Kenzo John Stevens Shambhala, 2007 101 pages $12.95 Buy: book | ebook In John Stevens’ half-biography/half-koan-medley Zen Bow, Zen Arrow, we visit bamboo-fenced dojos, learning from early 20th-century Japanese master Awa Kenzo how archery can be a vessel that