In a world filled with loss, diminishment, negation, Cole Swensen offers a book of addition. Not as the too-muchness we often live in, but as a “touch on the lip”; “a play of light on the windowsill”; “dust . . . just that sort of lightness that while unsettling, nonetheless settles.” Each page offers a […]
April, it’s been written, is the cruelest month. By now, generations of undergraduates have been dutifully instructed as to Eliot’s parodic intentions in the opening line of The Waste Land, with its allusion to the beginning of the “General Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales: Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March […]
Annelyse Gelman’s newest book, Vexations, is formally modeled on Erik Satie’s piano composition of the same name. Notorious for its ambiguity and duration, the piano piece consists of a haunting melody repeated 840 times—a true feat of stamina as a performance can take upwards of twelve hours. The one Gelman saw at age sixteen—the event […]
There’s a certain irony in analyzing a work such as 2 a.m. with Keats in light of the concept of negative capability, which eschews analysis in favor of embracing mystery and unanswered questions. Keats coined the phrase in a letter to his brothers in 1817, inspired by Shakespeare’s work, which he describes as “being in […]
I went a bit mad with Pink Waves, Sawako Nakayasu’s beautiful poem. Why? For several days after the first reading, I kept seeing a ribbon unspooling through corridors of a dream. Was Nakayasu’s book a spell? If so, I wanted to discover her new book as a grimoire. I diagrammed the structure like a card […]
Victoria Redel delivers the harrowing exodus of her extended refugee family through the frame of exile from Eden not as punishment but as an inevitable escape—it is these narrative inheritances that shape the speaker’s own story of survival. Redel reimagines the exile from Eden narrative, offered through seven poems spoken through the voice of Adam […]
When I am most stressed—when a concern hard and intractable churns, when a thought restless and wiry knots—I need a plan. That’s what I think. A notebook fills with charts, and impatient lines cross out items on the to-do list. An illusion of control. And then there’s the doodling while I listen to a lover […]
Helge Torvund’s Seriously Well is a case study in the complexity of simplicity, offering a striking meditation on the alchemy of art and life that walks a circuitous path through memory, music, and light to the moment the author learns he has a potentially life-threatening illness. Using language that is conversational, and at times spare, […]
Myth and legend are such magnificent subjects, ripe with the potential for resonance with modern circumstances. When we are young, discovering a particular legend that leads to fantastic reverie with the adventure of outwitting gods or coming across a figure whose tragic circumstances speak to our own narratives can provide access to otherwise unreachable histories. […]
Striding through the woods one autumn afternoon, with oak nuts falling, a red hawk sailing overhead, and a breeze cooling his reddened cheeks, the poet notes that, “all is living and all is dead.” It’s an observation that reflects, and in some way defines, the content of this collection by radiation oncologist Matthew Mumber. Confronting […]