This quietly devastating “book of friendship,” as the text is subtitled, both flies and lives in the body as Ruhl and Ritvo talk about soup, the afterlife, chemotherapy, and poems—all within breaths and pages of one another. If you already love Ritvo’s poetry, as I do, this book lends a new degree of intimacy and a greater perspective on the aesthetic metaphysics at work in his poems.
Of course, Albon is not building cities. He is writing poems. The same physics don’t apply. Moreover, he is explicitly critical of poetic preoccupations with worlding, with limitless creative expansionism.
What Arnold’s memoir is really about, however, is family. The running is secondary, an access point into the more complicated, contradictory details of her personal life. For Arnold, running both stifles and releases the grief that consumes her after losing her father, and the uncertainty, love, and regret that thump through her family’s history and the pages of this book.
She marshals scientific, intellectual, literary, and journalistic resources to document how climate change has impacted our world on multiple levels. Her book is a very honest appraisal of both the changes we have wrought and the challenges that we and our children must face.
As a collagist, Fincke’s medium is the paragraph, each seldom exceeding a dozen lines, demarcated by white space, and, more often than not, set off by a simple title as though each paragraph begins a new chapter. In many cases each paratactic paragraph flies in a different direction than the last.
Aguilar Camín varnishes his sentences with great perceptiveness and lyrical grace, and there is an almost effortless beauty and tremendous sensitivity to his prose, which makes reading his work particularly gratifying. Transporting the reader to places like Asturias and Mexico City to retrace the origins of his parents and grandparents, he invokes artistic license to depict not merely the locales but also their impressions of the place.
These sixty-four brief, carefully wrought essays center on the writer’s mother’s battle with cancer and on Babine’s use of cooking as a tool to cope. When her mother gets sick, Babine begins a delightful, quirky search to collect cookware—specifically colorful, vintage Le Creuset pieces that she gives names like Estelle and Agnes and Penelope Pumpkin.
Photo by Boston Public Library Dedicated to the memory of Gordon Smith The story comes in pieces, and you must think and weigh and assess and form your own impressions. Reserve judgment. Imagine other possibilities. Listen. You must delete from your memory that which was stricken from the record, which called for speculation, which […]
On Contemporary Art isn’t a critique of its subject but a discussion of its situation. Today, the idea of demarcating artistic movements has faded; after a century of artists, academics and critics culturally categorizing every new wave (die Brücke, de Stijl, Postimpressionism, Neo-Expressionism, and so on), Aira declares “the carnival of names [has] been shut down” and replaced by an empty, auction house-approved label.
Morales is able to string these eclectic stories together into a larger narrative, making the collection surprisingly cohesive and more like a book-length memoir than an essay collection.