Book Reviews

  • Now That the Audience is Assembled by David Grubbs reviewed by Devin King

    VOCATION FOR LONGING
    Issue #91 March 2019
  • Unshored Fragments: Dimitris Lyacos’ Post-Tragic Trilogy reviewed by Ilias Bistolas

    As long as a match stays alight.
    Issue #90 February 2019
  • Mark Scroggins’ “Pressure Dressing”, reviewed by Joshua Corey

    What do you want? What would make you happier?
    Issue #89 January 2019
  • Mystery and Surprise: Two Chinese Poets; reviewed by Alexander Dickow

    The contemporary Chinese poet Mang Ke and the Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin (9th century) could hardly be more different. The former, particularly in the later poems of the chronologically arranged collection, seems fresh and spontaneous, capricious; the latter hermetic and mysterious.

    Issue #88 December 2018
  • I Remember Nightfall: Marosa Di Giorgio, reviewed by Johannes Göransson

    Until recently, the great Uruguayan poet Marosa Di Giorgio (1932-2000) was largely untranslated.
    Issue #87 November 2018
  • Immanent Foundation: Norman Finkelstein, reviewed by Joshua Corey

    “Decision,” the first poem in Norman Finkelstein’s new book, announces an end to preliminaries and prolegomena: you must decide for the sake of whatever you love, whatever it is you still would cherish. Here is the formula. Here is the program. Here is the talisman. Here is the code.

    Issue #86 October 2018
  • Crawlspace: Nikki Wallschlaeger, reviewed by Timothy Otte

    Poetic forms are constraints. A constraint gives form and body, and also creates space. A body is a constraint. A sonnet is a constraint. A body is a sonnet and a room is a sonnet. And like bodies and rooms, sonnets take different shapes, variations on a theme: limbs, torso, head; walls, window, door; fourteen lines, argument, volta.

    Issue #85 August 2018
  • Cruel Futures: Carmen Giménez Smith, reviewed by Sarah Huener

    From its first pages, Cruel Futures is a book of intense assuredness. Carmen Giménez Smith’s latest book is richly lyrical, and dense with honesty. Her writing combines momentum with variety to keep the book lively.

    Issue #84 July 2018
  • CAConrad: While Standing in Line for Death

    Best known for the “(soma)tic” rituals that serve as the source materials for his verse and prose poems, poet, critic, and editor CAConrad is the embodiment of that old Whitman saw, a materialization of self-contradiction. In other words, he accepts, and thus enacts, the charge of the historical avant-garde: inaugurate the impossible as the negation (as if) of the world (as such).

    Issue #83 June 2018
  • Martha Collins: “Night Unto Night” and “Day Unto Day”

    What are the heavens, and what is the firmament—what, a house, and for how long? How do we live, die, survive? Such existential questions, great and small, animate the devotional poetics of Martha Collins, translator and poet. With the recent publication of Night Unto Night (Milkweed, 2018), Collins completes a diptych twelve years in the making, which she first began with her collection, Day Unto Day (Milkweed, 2014).

    Issue #82 May 2018
  • Karla Kelsey: Of Sphere and Hermaphropoetics & Rochelle Owens: Drifting Geometries

    In very different ways these two collections—Kelsey’s book-length “proem” (her Prelude) of prose ruminations interspersed with lyric poems, Owens’ book-length poem organized around mathematical objects and concepts—ponder the problem of perception in relation to the presumptions that underpin the “obvious,” the superficial, the prison-house of routine, all targets, historically, of both “bookish” religions and philosophical phenomenology.

    Issue #81 April 2018
  • John Matthias & Jean Dibble & Robert Archambeau: Revolutions: a Collaboration

    Revolutions, the title of this collaboration among a Notre Dame-affiliated poet (John Mathias), a printmaker (Jean Dibble), and a literary critic (Robert Archambeau), is mildly deceptive; the book is less concerned with creating insurgencies than carrying out a more playful, syncretic practice within our revolutionary present.

    Issue #80 March 2018