July 14, 2017
On Animals Strike Curious Poses by Elena Passarello
Louisville, KY: Sarabande Books, 2017. 200 pages. $19.95. How often do we get to thank Prince for the title to a collection of essays? His hit song “When Doves Cry” […]
July 14, 2017
On Should I Still Wish: A Memoir by John W. Evans
Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. 139 pages. $19.95. “Exit, pursued by a bear,” Shakespeare’s preposterous stage direction from The Winter’s Tale, deliberately emphasizes the fictive. The interesting fact […]
July 7, 2017
“Up to Their Necks in Fuel”: On Patricia Smith’s Incendiary Art
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017. 125 pages. $18.95. Patricia Smith’s new book of poems is, as advertised, combustible, its stanzas overcrowded with detail—adjectives mostly—like rooms that would never pass […]
July 7, 2017
Everything, a Story: A Review of Ari Banias’s Anybody
New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2016. 112 pages. $25.95. “At the end of a rope, all lambs act the same,” Ari Banias writes in his first poetry collection, Anybody. […]
July 3, 2017
Nothing There: The Late Poetry of John Koethe
This review appears in the July/Aug 2017 issue of the Kenyon Review The Swimmer. John Koethe. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. 96 pp. $23.00. John Koethe’s tenth book, The Swimmer, […]
July 3, 2017
Rereading Ransom
This review appears in the July/Aug 2017 issue of the Kenyon Review The Collected Poems of John Crowe Ransom. Ed. Ben Mazer. Un-Gyve Press, 2015. 396 pp. $75.00. The Collected […]
June 30, 2017
“Things Predicted Are Always Restricted”: Lyn Hejinian’s Anti-Sonnets
The Unfollowing. Oakland, CA: Omnidawn, 2016. 96 pages. $17.95 Early in spring, the pink of magnolia blossoms and the bright yellow of forsythia begin to flash in the park near […]
June 30, 2017
A Missing Piece of the Midcentury: On Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lúcio Cardoso
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson. Rochester, NY: Open Letter, 2016. 592 pages. $17.95. A wind intermittently relieves the high insistent sun beating down on the far-off province. […]
June 23, 2017
“Blind the Way a Dark-Adapted Animal is Blind”: On Fearful Beloved by Khadijah Queen
Litchfield, CT: Argos Books, 2015. 120 pages. $16.00. I’m no herbalist, but this is what I know about medicinal plants: When it comes to healing humans, our plant friends aren’t […]
June 23, 2017
On About My Mother by Tahar Ben Jelloun
Translated by Ros Schwartz and Lulu Norman. London: Telegram Books, 2016. 288 pages. $16.95. “For the older writer,” Julian Barnes has written in the memoir of his parents’ deaths, Nothing […]
June 21, 2017
June Micro-Reviews
Niall Campbell. First Nights. Princeton University Press, 2016. 88 pages. $17.95. I loved Niall Campbell’s prize-winning first collection, Moontide (Bloodaxe), so I when I heard about the expanded US edition, […]
June 21, 2017
June 2017 Micro-Reviews
Niall Campbell. First Nights. Princeton University Press, 2016. 88 pages. $17.95. I loved Niall Campbell’s prize-winning first collection, Moontide (Bloodaxe), so I when I heard about the expanded US edition, […]