A novel teaches you how to read it. In the novels that make up Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy, the education could go like this: the confounding of motive of the first novel (Outline) gives way to the vertigo inducing ease of the second (Transit). By the last volume, Kudos, you […]
Kenji C. Liu’s new collection, Monsters I Have Been, is the product of a manifesto: at once a call to disarm toxic masculinity and a theory of how to lyrically explore the state of our society through a practice of found poetry assemblage that Liu calls frankenpo. More than a […]
What do you know about Modernism? The Process Art Movement? How do you feel about Modern Art? You don’t have to answer to see that My Oceanography is a collection of excellent poems, but it helps to know something just as it does to wear those headphones in a museum […]
In an interview with LitHub, Kazuo Ishiguro has advised writers to let go of genre boundaries, to start with relationships, and Erik Anderson has done likewise. Published by Rescue Press in 2016, Estranger examines an author’s relationships to the many aspects of his life: Family, writing, his conversations with his […]
In El más crudo invierno, his book-length meditation on seven lines by Peruvian poet Blanca Varela, Mario Montalbetti (Lima, Peru, 1953) cites and glosses Agamben’s definition of poetry as “the suspension and exhibition of language.” What is suspended in a poem, he explains, is primarily language’s referential function, its arrival […]
In an interview from 2014, the American novelist Jumpa Lahiri is quoted as saying: “Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece—just different elements of belonging and not-belonging.” The feeling of belonging contained in these particular facets of experience is integral to our lives. It constitutes our basic […]
SPLIT SECONDS: THE LANDSCAPE PAINTINGS OF MICHAEL GOODWIN a micro-interview with Elaine Sexton ELAINE SEXTON: These landscapes have great presence. You seem to have stilled something fleeting, like memory, a moment in which the clouds in the sky looked spectacular or the light shaded the trees on a given day, something forgotten until […]
Reading and re-reading, for the pleasure of its form, “Birth of a Nation” has left me astounded. With its documentary poetics worked into the ground of the poem rather than dominating the frame, and with its precise juxtapositions and anecdotal tone, “Birth of a Nation” foregrounds not the new […]
Jane Wong‘s poems can be found in Best American Poetry 2015, American Poetry Review, AGNI, Poetry, and others. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Fine Arts Work Center, Hedgebrook, and Bread Loaf. She is the author of Overpour (Action Books, 2016) and […]
Ah how morbid you move cougar contending to cross the garden cage where you have locked yourself in between cold mirrors to keep from leaving, […]
