A Presence Solved by Its Own Absence: On Anne Carson’s “Wrong Norma”
Whatever answers are to be found lie in the blank space around them, that looming, claustrophobic blankness. Snow. Shame. History. Monstrosity. The steaming, stinking heap of it. Carson lets it answer for itself.
A Tourist in the Underworld: On Tomas Tranströmer
To begin with “klang” is inherently onomatopoetic: you get the primary sound and also its “klang,” you get the signification and its associative resonance. So many of Tranströmer’s poems are about listening, or even living, in a kind of sonic aftermath.
“To Remembrance When a Mercy”: On Fady Joudah
Because the question, as Joudah points out, is not repeatedly being asked: do you believe that Palestinian lives are equal to Israeli lives and Jewish lives?
from “We Made it to School Alive”
& that someone asked the blushed face father will he see him again & he said absolutely absolutely & I thought we are the same
from “Say in the end”
Each center describes what happens in another center
I’m not a cynic, I’m here
Words Scumble the View: On Lindsay Turner’s “The Upstate”
Where is upstate? A proximity, a region positioned degrees away from somewhere not upstate, forever elsewhere.
What’s a Sad Wolf To Do?: On Lauren Haldeman’s “Team Photograph”
Comics show eyes, minds, people where to go, how to organize spatial information, what’s important, what to see. Photographs don’t, or not in the same way: maps do.
Some Ekphrastic Evening: On Fred Moten’s “perennial fashion presence falling”
He emphasizes the way that content prophesies form, or the way that form supervenes upon content—which is to say, he emphasizes the way in which the void leaps and sticks its landing.
What Poems Can’t: On Terrance Hayes
Watch Your Language shadows So to Speak, offering what the poems can’t—not explanations of the origins of lyric impulse, but a recreation of the process involved in coaxing it.
Brutal Naturalism: On Luke Johnson’s “Quiver”
The desire to flay and spread open the guts, to commit sin and confess it, to claim responsibility by way of observational learning.
The Live Louise Glück
When you grow up alongside a writer and see them change and rearrange and deliver a new object still dripping sweat, that object looks different than if you were merely recovering it from the long march of literature by the no-longer living.
Only This or That: On Maggie Millner’s “Couplets”
You thought you knew everything about couplets, and then realize there’s something new to discover in the familiar form. An uncovering of fossils, a tomb whose bones are still intact, jewelry in place and shining around the dusty vertebrae.
The Precarious “North” of Jacques Darras
Darras’ poetry may long for the alleged poetic horizon from which waves—and, indeed, shades—emanate but, in its subtle (if finless) wisdom, remains coastal, content to let lyric fall tame upon the sand.
Languages of Exile: On Aria Aber and Solmaz Sharif
What may seem at odds—Rilke and exilic Afghan selfhood, the DMAT and exilic Iranian selfhood—is connected and made whole. All become one in a language where poets imagine impossible homes for their fractured selves.
from “Slow Violence”
as melt, magnolia, test cricket, and breath
manta, sway, Cairngorms, slow spinning
Spring or All Desertion: On Walt Hunter’s “Some Flowers”
The function of repetition, of questions being asked toward impossibility, is to create the conditions by which prayer becomes a conceivable way of engaging with the world.
Milk Money: On Laura Mullen’s “EtC”
Mullen hands us this unsellable product of the Diary Industry as if it were what we’d always wanted—a project book stripped of recognizable content by the very process of that projection. It’s genre-ending.