NewPages Blog :: Book Reviews

Doll Studies: Forensics, a collection of tightly woven prose poems, investigates a series of crime scene dioramas portrayed with dolls and doll sets. A strong, questioning voice describes and comments on each diorama from various perspectives, piecing together a narrative built from individual scenes. Through engaging, fine-tuned poems, Carol Guess leads the reader through the dramas and mysteries left behind and reenacted with these dolls, creating a strange yet fascinating glimpse into two artistic mediums playing off one another and commenting on human fault and tragedy. Continue reading “Doll Studies”

Aaron McCollough’s fourth book, No Grave Can Hold My Body Down, is the most ambitious project we’ve seen released by the young author. In this book-length series, each section is titled after the songs on John Fahey’s album America—in fact, if you’ve followed McCollough’s work in recent years you would have seen some of these pieces, or versions of, published in journals as “selections from John Fahey’s America.” The book’s title recalls Johnny Cash, which along with Fahey and mentions of “Little Sadie,” “Tom Dooley,” Charley Patton, and the blues, places this collection squarely in conversation with the American songwriting tradition. Continue reading “No Grave Can Hold My Body Down”

After reading the title, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this book. It gave me the strange feeling I’d be reading letters, or advice, from the future. Ironically, Salier focuses tremendously on the current so-called Mayan threat of the end of the world. Since we have already lived through a few apocalyptic threats within the last decade or so, it’s refreshing to contemplate the future through the lens of someone who admits that “every friday at 2pm i feel strongly / that i should’ve been an astronaut.” Continue reading “Letters from Robots”

John Kinsella’s In the Shade of the Shady Tree: Stories of Wheatbelt Australia should entice the reader who enjoys unusual fiction in a strange place of extremes, off the tourist map. Kinsella describes his very short short stories as “stories told for the moment, out of experience more than ‘art,’”—similar to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Kinsella’s interests are how the people Continue reading “In the Shade of the Shady Tree”

Letters to Kelly Clarkson is full of short letters written from the narrator to American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson, beginning with “Dear Kelly.” Although there were certainly thoughts and points that stuck out as interesting to me, the majority of the letters were ungrounded and rambling. A letter at the beginning of the book opens with: “You know, sitting here, eating my microwaved tomatoes on somewhat tough toast, I think I could give myself another chance.” And I started silently cheering, we all deserve a second chance! Good for you! But then the next lines were: “Seriously, can you tell me why I keep dreaming of a chipped white truck? Could it be the swerve of it, the handle? A rush of blood to the hand.” I was so intrigued by the second chance that I wanted to know all the details of how she messed up and with whom and how she was planning to fix it. Yet there was no resolution for me and I felt like the writer had left me high and dry, though perhaps this was her intention. Continue reading “Letters to Kelly Clarkson”

It’s not just the references to Mad Max in Quincy Troupe’s Errançities which suggest a sense of perpetual collapse. It’s also the rampant amnesia. It’s the ignorance of cultural amnesia, the acknowledgement of this amnesia but having too many of one’s “own vexing / problems, way too many”; it’s the amnesia of important thoughts you fail to record. It’s a desire to be somewhere else, somewhere otherworldly, somewhere “beyond our knowing” where “silence reigns.” It’s a desire to dissociate from the “I” for a while, and to become the “eye” instead. It’s the admission that even you are quick to discard society’s discards. It’s the never-ending cycle of forgetting and reminding. It’s smoothing over the past with a kind of politeness that doesn’t change anything in “these yet to be united states.” Continue reading “Errançities”

Not many memoirs approach the act of resisting a totalitarian regime through a child’s eyes. But then, reading Carmen Bugan’s Burying the Typewriter is an unusual experience. Continue reading “Burying the Typewriter”

A poignant ride through different phases of the protagonist’s life, Domestic Apparition is funny, sarcastic, dark, reflective, and touching. The first few stories are set in Michelle’s domestic life—her resistance to being drafted to school when she is six years old, her awe for her brilliant but eccentric brother’s courage in challenging a strict Catholic teacher in school, her admiration for her older sister’s guts, her parents’ relationship, and her mother’s unfulfilled dreams. Gradually, we move toward her life when she starts living by herself in college with roommates, her tedious job at a Holiday Inn which she is pushed into by her demanding boyfriend, and finally her job in the heart of corporate America. Continue reading “Domestic Apparition”

Andreï Makine, whose Dreams of My Russian Summers won France’s highest literary award, employs his beautifully lyrical style again in The Life of an Unknown Man. Maxine, who was born in Siberia and has lived more than twenty years in France, has set this novel in both Paris and Russia during the siege of Leningrad and Stalin’s purges. In spite of some of the grim details of starvation particularly, the beauty of the prose makes these images dreamlike, almost ephemeral. The sense of humanity at the core abides in two old Russians, one living in Paris and one whom the protagonist meets in Russia, both having lived beyond their generation and thus becoming “unknown.” The span of this novel takes us from literary concerns to love during wartime to the music that kept the Russians going in spite of deprivation. At the end, the reader feels keenly the loss of an unknown but incredible life of survival and the sacrifice of love. Continue reading “The Life of an Unknown Man”

In this collection of sixteen essays, Sergio Troncoso writes about family, fatherhood, education, illness, love, politics, religion, social issues, societal responsibility, and writing. He observes that his clear, direct writing about difficult questions “has sometimes condemned [him] in academic circles” and that his writing is also “overlooked by those who never desire to think beyond the obvious and the popular.” Troncoso chronicles his transformation from “a besieged outsider needing a voice” to “an outsider by choice deploying [his] voice,” creating an intellectual borderland from where he tried to push his mind with the philosophical ideas that form the framework of his writing. Continue reading “Crossing Borders”

In my own reading experience, nothing beats the first-person account of the interview, offering as it does an essential glimpse into what’s happening in the mind of the subject. As the instigator of responses in this collection, David Baker takes a rather light hand and offers little fleshiness, certainly no blood, yet presents an easygoing introduction to both the poet-as-person as well as the work. Continue reading “Talk Poetry”

I Take Back the Sponge Cake almost looks like a children’s book at first glance. But in reality, this book is a whimsical, lyrical adventure that takes you down a different path with every read. Choose-your-own-adventure books are a rare but surprising delight to come across, and this book is no exception. I especially like how abstract the poetry is; it matches the artwork perfectly. Rather than choosing a direction or making an ethical choice at the turn of each page, the reader is given the privilege of choosing a word to fill in the poems themselves. The words are homonyms (for example, weight and wait, or ring and wring), so although they are pronounced the same, the different meanings lend different import to each choice. The readers’ personal styles and lives have an effect on which word they choose, giving them a unique experience. Continue reading “I Take Back the Sponge Cake”

Age and the academy dominate John Rember’s latest collection, Sudden Death, Over Time. Master of the cynical first person male, Rember repeatedly places readers in the context of professors well past their prime, who know that their best choice left is to smirk at the absurdity surrounding their departments, their students, and their love lives and to plod along. Continue reading “Sudden Death, Over Time”

Nod House is an epic poem, a surreal migration, an eloquent, fractured elegy. Its world and lyrics are volatile, traversing multiple landscapes, realities and bodies. Characters who start off as heads bobbing in a pond later turn bird: Continue reading “Nod House”

For an allegedly silent art, ballet has inspired many good words. Essays by poet Edwin Denby and critic Arlene Croce are worthy writing workshop handouts. Choreographer Agnes de Mille’s books are histories of dance and America. Jacques d’Amboise’s memoir I Was A Dancer is not only candid; the charming, legendary dancer wrote it as if he was telling his story over coffee. Continue reading “The Cranes Dance”

A collection is an interesting thing. Traditionally, we can expect to find a collection in some sort of museum setting—a set of archaeological artifacts or art objects that allows the audience to understand another culture. A collection of writing, however, is particularly interesting as it allows a reader to examine an author’s intellectual and aesthetic commitments. In a collection of writing, the reader has more than simply the Objekt to examine or look at; the surrounding context for the author’s intended themes is available to the reader as well. These themes, in turn, become the real collection on display to the reader. In Wonderful Investigations: Essays, Meditations, Tales, author Dan Beachy-Quick amasses quite a cabinet of written curiosities that serve as the basis for his Investigations—a collection that does not seem to argue for a specifically particular point or theme, but, rather, a collection that allows the reader to examine Beachy-Quick’s intellectual and aesthetic commitments to his own treasured authors. Continue reading “Wonderful Investigations”

Poet and critic Richard Outram was for me one of those writers who occasionally popped up on the periphery of my poetry explorations. I saw him referenced and quoted until I began to wonder who he was. Outram was like one of those neighbors you never introduced yourself to. You passed him or her once or twice a week and waved without an inkling of who they were or what they did. Continue reading “Richard Outram”

Jeff Alessandrelli’s debut book of poems, Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound, is an homage of sorts to Satie, the 19th- and 20th-century avant-garde composer. Throughout the collection, a portrait of Satie emerges ghostlike through bits of autobiography, both real and imagined. However, through the insistent refrain of “tells us nothing,” the reader is reminded of how little access or insight one can really be given into another life—how little understanding one can glean from facts and details, and even from the composer’s own writing. Even so, the fragments assembled portray Satie as an eccentric genius who was both admired and reviled during his lifetime. Continue reading “Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound”

Evelyn Posamentier’s Poland at the Door is a remarkable book. It is a collection of very short poems, the longest being ten lines while most of poems oscillate between four to six lines. The collection’s poetic “I” remains in a room, behind a closed door. She half-expects, half-dreads some visitors. Her short statements help to visualize her surroundings—walls, door, monitors in the hall outside, a broken phone, the weather in- and outdoors, and the luring but never really appearing guests. Longer poems are intertwined with single lines that laconically state “the days of awe” and “the days between” (or either of the two). This gives the impression of the passage of time in an unfamiliar place, reflecting perhaps Posamentier’s time spent in Poland. Occasionally, the “days of awe/days between” are replaced by the exclamation “holy, holy, holy,” which refers either to Poland’s Catholic culture or to the subject’s sense of the world’s sacredness. Continue reading “Poland at the Door”

Metaphysical, haunting and meditative, Woolgathering’s lyrical musings very much mimic Patti Smith’s song lyrics in that they are constantly in structural flux, seamlessly flitting from personal narratives to abstract wanderings to slim lines of poetry. The result is reminiscent of an intimate journal, scattered with childhood photographs, reaching for truth, beauty and transformation. Continue reading “Woolgathering”

“Memory holds us until we are ready to see,” Deni Y. Béchard writes in his memoir, Cures for Hunger. The passage of time has given him a panorama from which to piece together the missing links of his life. Béchard’s book is his tale of the sometimes hardscrabble childhood he endured in British Columbia with a mother from Pittsburgh and a father of very vague origins. The existence was sometimes hand-to-mouth, with a father who sold fish during the summer and Christmas trees during the winter, ways of life that seemed to have as many ups and downs as the stock market. Continue reading “Cures for Hunger”

Travel literature and memoir is a jumble of familiar tropes and themes, and All the Roads Are Open: the Afghan Journey certainly contains all of those recognizable elements and more. All the Roads Are Open is Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s collection of essays, stories, notes, and thoughts about her overland travels from Geneva to Afghanistan through Afghanistan’s Northern Road with herself, fellow writer Ella Maillart, and their third companion—a Ford with a mind and temperament of its own. Continue reading “All the Roads Are Open”

Jane Gardam’s magnificent novel Crusoe’s Daughter, first published in 1985 in England and only now published in the U.S., was Gardam’s favorite of her novels: “Take it or leave it, Crusoe’s Daughter says everything I have to say.” Those familiar with the books of this largely unknown, very British novelist will recognize aspects of Gardam’s writing later echoed in Old Filth, The Man With the Wooden Hat and the more recently published God on the Rocks: the wonderfully odd characters sometimes reminiscent of Dickens; the humor; an era’s precise, tiny details of place and people; and indirectly given information, often about past forbidden romances. Continue reading “Crusoe’s Daughter”

Hollywood is an industry town that manufactures dreams. Those dreams can be nightmarish, as in Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust (whose woefully underappreciated 1975 film adaptation is as disturbing and ugly as its source), or bittersweet, like Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist. Continue reading “Hollywood Boulevard”

Into This World is a novel that spans time, point of view, and geography to tell the story of a family’s search for identity and relationship. Mina is a child brought home from the Korean War by Wayne to join his American family that consists of his wife Bonnie, who longs for a second child, and his daughter Allison, who is not so pleased by the family’s new addition. The story opens when Allison and Mina are adults. Mina has moved to Korea in search of her birth mother and to reclaim her heritage. Allison discovers she has unfinished business with Mina and travels to Seoul in hopes of unraveling their complex past. Continue reading “Into This World”

Rebecca Lindenberg’s first book of poems is concerned with loss. She takes up composing an extended elegy with little unnecessary adornment of sentiment. Lindenberg deserves credit for not making this book a clear-cut narrative of her years-long serious romance with the poet Craig Arnold, who vanished in 2009 while on a hiking visit to an active volcano—an apparent passion of his. In place of that, these are poems built of necessity; some happen to be soundings of specific moments of Lindenberg’s life with Arnold, but such concern remains secondary. Continue reading “Love, An Index”

Nothing Can Make Me Do This, a novel in linked stories by David Huddle, excavates the geography of loneliness and relationships. Each story looks at a sedimentary layer in the history of the Houseman family circle, not necessarily in chronological order. These characters, revealed in close third person narration or first person, do not wander geographically far from the home nest for very long. Journeys are internal and sometimes deeply buried. The through-thread in this family history is the voice of the secret sexual self, somehow unshared even in intimacy. Continue reading “Nothing Can Make Me Do This”

Zara Raab’s collection centers around place and people, the Eel of the title a river in California where generations of Raab’s family settled. Raab lets the reader know early on that place will serve as an important theme throughout the collection, as each of the three section titles relate to place: “A Land of Wonders,” “Coming to Branscomb,” and “Hills above the Eel.” The collection shows a place changing, moving from a place that is not even a town, where a family’s house can serve as the one-room schoolhouse, to a contemporary city, though still small, with contemporary troubles. Continue reading “Swimming the Eel”

Eileen Myles hides the trout. She’s at it again. This new double collection of poems from Wave Books in Seattle has everything readers of Myles adore in her work. All the wit, charm, honesty, sexiness, and surprises are here for another go-round. Yes, Myles has gotten older: Continue reading “Snowflake/Different Streets”

Gathering from the oral tradition of organic and sustainable farmers along the coast of the Central California region, Cultivating a Movement compiles selected interviews from key farmers that began and continue to pursue the sustainable agriculture movement in the United States and Mexico. While this project highlights only 27 individuals and couples, the vast online archive contains many more interviews with key farmers, politicians, academics, scientists, and many more ecologically minded individuals that contribute to this movement. Ranging in age, gender, class, and ethnicity, all of these farmers are involved with organic and sustainable farms that vary in size and crop. Continue reading “Cultivating a Movement”

In this book, the two writers explore various elements and facets of modern air travel. The design of the pocket-sized volume is unusual: it is reversible, each half reflecting the unique perspective of its author. Both men are professors in the English Department at Loyola University in New Orleans where they met. Checking In contains the observations and experiences of Schaberg, who once worked as a cross-utilized agent for SkyWest Airlines at the Gallatin Field Airport near Bozeman, Montana while he was attending graduate school. In Checking Out, Yakich explores his lifelong fear of flying. Schaberg and Yakich recently launched a website, www.airplanereading.org, on which they publish an ongoing anthology about air travel in their effort, according to the website’s mission statement, to take airplane reading “beyond throwaway entertainment or mere distraction.” Continue reading “Checking In / Checking Out”

In the mid-1990s, Cheryl Strayed hit a wall. Her mother died of cancer at age 45, only 49 days after diagnosis. Soon after, her marriage unraveled, and she took up with a man of dubious qualities who introduced her to heroin. She liked it, smoking the black tar and occasionally sniffing the powder. It was certainly easier than coping with the out-of-nowhere shock of her mother’s death, coupled with the dissolution of her union with a man she once loved and perhaps still did. She was beating a steady retreat into oblivion. Continue reading “Wild”

Kevin Young is smarter than I am, and a galactically better poet. Reading Young’s The Grey Album makes me feel dumb and confused, and part of that is due to his poetic leaps in tone from academic to vernacular. It’s also due to the fact that I’m ignorant. I am whiter than blank, and ignorant of more than half of Young’s references. But reading The Grey Album also makes me feel like reaching, like the exchange student who doesn’t yet speak or read the language, but her eyes and ears are burning to. With time, she’ll understand. With time, she’ll connect, become a part of the conversation. She just needs time. I just need time with Kevin Young’s essays. Continue reading “The Grey Album”

Here’s an idea for a story. Take a beautiful life: happy marriage, comfortable home, and a smart and talented daughter, the three of you eating in a different restaurant every night. Ignore the husband’s loner party binges in the basement. Push aside the wife’s curiosity of her yoga teacher’s guiding hands on her hips. Everyone’s entitled to a little secret, except daughters. Don’t even suspect that daughters, locked in their rooms, are not doing homework. Now throw in a surprise visitor from the past and witness the beautiful life unravel. Next explore the aftermath from three points of view: wife, husband, daughter. Why not? All three are watching each other, and nobody’s really talking. Continue reading “The Edge of Maybe”

Polymath George Steiner offers up an essay that will, in all likelihood, either send readers into the library stacks with a long list of sources for further reading or drive them away from finishing his text. There are instances here where on a single page, no less than ten names from a diverse range of languages and eras throughout Western thought are bandied about as if Steiner were relaying a conversation with a young child or a walk he takes to the park every day. It’s most likely to be found either hopelessly intimidating or a joke, depending on the temperament of the reader. Continue reading “The Poetry of Thought”

I never forgot that photo. It was in a history of the Metropolitan Opera, and soprano Olive Fremstad was Salome holding the platter with John the Baptist’s head. Even by 1907 standards, her beaded costume and big hair were beyond camp, but to my teenaged self the waxy, dead head looked real enough. I was sufficiently creeped out to avoid Richard Strauss’ opera until adulthood, when I discovered Salome’s true horrors: placing unrealistic demands on its lead to perform a striptease to music that’s impossible to dance—let alone time the tearing off of seven veils—to, before singing a punishingly long monologue to the Baptist’s head prior to kissing it (gross . . . even if it should resemble Bryn Terfel, a recent Met Baptist). With the exception of Electra, Richard Strauss was never again so creatively daring. Continue reading “The Severed Head”

She’d Waited Millennia, Lizzie Hutton’s debut poetry collection of lyrical free verse, finds its emotional core by navigating through the rises and falls of motherhood. Poems ranging in stanzaic and linear form encompass the breadth of intimacies in relationships: from mother to child, lover to lover, and friend to friend. Each inextricably linked poem gathers strength through an accumulation of immediacy with images that build upon one another; the speaker’s examination of the world reveals a close and complicated relationship with description’s power. Continue reading “She’d Waited Millennia”

In 1953, Isaac Berlin composed what is perhaps his best known essay, “The Fox and The Hedgehog,” in which he outlines two specific types of literary genius. He describes Russian writers like Fyodor Dostoyesky who focus narrowly on a character—exploring the every nuance and complex mystique of an individual within his broader context. Authors like Alexander Pushkin, on the other hand, utilize a broad long duree approach to narrative, giving the reader such a sweeping perspective that the individual is simply one part among many of the fabric or context that surrounds him. In short, Berlin’s “foxes” and “hedgehogs” are a useful structure for making sense of two different traditions of literature—particularly Russian literature—along a continuum, and Berlin’s allegorical mammals become a shorthand reference to a specific perspective or type of narration. Vladimir’s Mustache and Other Stories by Stephan Eirik Clark is a brilliant collection of short stories that illustrate the genius of both fox and hedgehog types in Russian literature. Each of his short stories is a fox or a hedgehog with a unique or ironic plot twist that brings to light Clark’s dark absurdist humor. Continue reading “Vladimir’s Mustache and Other Stories”

As the subtitle notes, Beauty is a Verb has been marked as the new poetry of disability. After a “Short History of American Disability Poetry,” this hefty anthology is broken off into sections, for example: “The Disability Poetics Movement,” “Lyricism of the Body,” and “Towards a New Language of Embodiment.” Rather than just including the actual poetry, authors preface their work with short autobiographies. They touch upon their disabilities as well as how they affect both their lives and their art. This allows the reader to have a more personal interaction with the poetry, as there is a foundation for the words and for the experience. Continue reading “Beauty is a Verb”

Winner of the prestigious G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, Living Arrangements, a collection of short stories by Laura Maylene Walter, offers the reader thirteen well-crafted stories, crisp in their language, tight in their structure, and thought-provoking in their effect. Most of the stories deal with loss, memory, family relations, and a variety of “living arrangements.” Continue reading “Living Arrangements”

As one might gather from the titles of Joseph Millar’s three volumes of poetry—Overtime (2001), Fortune (2007) and Blue Rust (2012)—he is a direct heir to the working-class likes of James Wright, B.H. Fairchild, and current U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine. But it would be reductive and unfair to call Millar simply “a working-class poet,” as though the only readers to which he could possibly appeal are those who have spent time laboring in the “real world.” Simply put, Millar is a poet who traffics in the real things of an everyday world, crafting well-spoken poems that take up the most universal themes of friends, family, hard luck, and love. And his newest book, Blue Rust, in spite of its grit, its grease, and its often mournful tone, astounds with countless moments of shimmering clarity, offering brief reprieves from a tough life eked out in the shadow of a troubled past. “Dutch Roll” finds Millar and his father ice-skating, sharing a rare, transcendent day: Continue reading “Blue Rust”

Research cul de sacs and again and again you will be told that their purpose is to reduce traffic. Sure, I’ll buy that as a contributing factor. Dig a little deeper and you come across a buzzword, “perceived risk.” But we all know the real reason: privacy. Anyone who’s ever looked into buying a house has discovered that you pay extra to live on a No Outlet street. We pine for a space of our own away from the bustle of the modern world, but as Scott Wrobel reveals in cul de sac, here lies danger. Continue reading “cul de sac”

When we first meet Saint Monica, she is covered in gauze and iodine. The epigraph that introduces Mary Biddinger’s Saint Monica informs us that the historical St. Monica was student to St. Ambrose, mother to St. Augustine, and wife of an abusive, alcoholic pagan. That Monica, patron saint of adultery victims, alcoholism, and of course, disappointing children, spent much of her time working for the redemption of her husband and once wayward offspring. Continue reading “Saint Monica”

In first glancing through Schizophrene by Bhanu Kapil, I hardly felt at ease in reviewing a book that depicts the sentiments of the 1947 Partition of India, the aftermath of violence, the displacement, and mental illness, all in the form of prose poetry. I know little about the topic and the genre. The sheer emotional impact of reading disturbing sections out of context left a pit in my stomach. I was afraid to read the account in its entirety, but also, I was ashamed not to. The tome—not weighty in size, but in content—sat on my desk for weeks, haunting me, finding its way again and again to the top of my teetering stack. I’d glimpse the bright, inviting image on the cover, yet worry. What frightened me? Why was the book still there? Continue reading “Schizophrene”

A teenager goes about her day. Her activities—taking public transportation, going to school, cattily noticing what other women are wearing, doing chores—are ordinary ones. Equally normal are her feelings regarding the death of her father, the grief she and her mother share but can never comfort each other with, and longing for the close relationship she once shared with her married sister. Continue reading “Schoolgirl”

Fort Gorgeous, Angela Vogel’s first full-length collection, populates an original fairytale landscape—one grounded thematically in 19th and 20th century American literature and painting—with a village of anachronistic, pop-cultural misfits who define the contours of the contemporary American identity. Vogel’s poems, so playful and satisfying when read aloud, imply that these American archetypes, figures once representing a type of individualism, have now been commodified, reduced to emblems in our mass-produced, mashed-up and hyper-mediated versions of reality. The reader imagines, while reading the thirty-seven ultra-imaginative poems in this collection, that the characters in Fort Gorgeous have themselves mindlessly purchased the dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, neatly packaged and wrapped. Continue reading “Fort Gorgeous”

The prose pieces in Megan Volpert’s new collection of poetry, Sonics in Warholia, read more like essays, but defining or discussing the boundaries of different genres serves no purpose and would completely miss the mark of this stunning collection. Comprised of eight pieces, the book offers extended meditations, both far-reaching and deeply personal, surrounding the biography of (and addressed to the ghost of) Andy Warhol. Throughout the book, Volpert masterfully weaves together seemingly disparate images, events, and ideas to brilliantly create complete and coherent essays that can appeal to both those who are familiar and those who are unfamiliar with Warhol’s life and work. Volpert’s vision is clever, touching, and singular. Continue reading “Sonics in Warholia”

As explained in Version 3.0, the plays in this new anthology of Asian American drama are rarely produced outside of New York City and California. Yet they ought to be, as they encompass many cultures’ assimilation and conflicts with white culture. The anthology spans the generations from the Japanese internment years up to the multi-racial 2000s. The first wave of plays has common themes of “Asian American history and immigration, generational and familial conflict, cultural identity and nationalism.” The second wave further includes Chinese and Filipino playwrights, and the third those of Indian, Korean and Vietnamese descent. This last group, with l4% identifying themselves as “multiracial” in the 2000 census, says, “No single writer can represent an entire culture; only a community of writers can do that.” Continue reading “Version 3.0”

Any collection of national poetry shows its audience the formed, collective identity of its poets and their artistic milieu. The Vanishing Point That Whistles: An Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Poetry is no exception. In truth, the anthology, brilliantly compiled by editors Paul Doru Mugur, Adam J. Sorkin, and Claudia Serea, sketches a post-Iron Curtain world where Romanian national identity is as fractured as its economy and societal mores are as complex as the centuries of religious strata that seem to overlay every life – or, in the case of the poems, every text. To quote Doru Mugur in his introduction, these texts are what linguist Umberto Eco calls “the authentic fake” and, in the context of The Vanishing Point That Whistles, the texts, the lives, and the poems are the truths, lies, and everything grey in between. The theme of “authentic fake” through a fractured national identity is most clearly seen through the poems and prose that acknowledge the deep and permeating role of religion in Romania’s national identity, rawly juxtaposed against everyday being and everyday living in Romania. Continue reading “The Vanishing Point that Whistles”

Like Shakespeare’s play, Traffic with Macbeth is a fearless journey into the depths of myth, the human psyche, and often violence. There is a density to many of the poems, which at times renders them a bit opaque. Yet, so well-crafted are the lyrics that the hard shells of her images beg to be cracked. Images that are impenetrable are simultaneously beautiful and terrible and remind the reader of the artistry of mystery. However, no matter the difficulty of meaning, Szporluk’s tone always rings clear. At every step, the tongues of Macbeth’s witches and Macbeth’s own tortured soul slouch at the margins of these poems, whispering to them, feeding them the macabre spirit that produced such haunting lyrics as those in “Baba Yaga”: Continue reading “Traffic with Macbeth”