The importance of music—specifically, rock and roll—cannot be overstated when considering this novel. From Iggy & the Stooges to the MC5, Beautiful Music is a veritable crash course in Detroit’s lasting legacy on the music scene; the clanging guitars and screaming singers changed the wiring of an entire generation.
Can Music Save Us? A Review of Michael Zadoorian’s “Beautiful Music” Read More »
In the preface to his latest book, Census, Jesse Ball tells readers the book is not about what it is about. He wanted to write a book about the loss of his brother who lived with Down syndrome; in the end, he wrote a book about a traveling, dying man who must perform a census of an unknown, magical nature.
What Jesse Ball’s “Census” Is and Is Not Read More »
“Idiophone is a dance between Fusselman and her reader; Fusselman is always fully leading, sometimes at a stately pace, but most often at one that is allegro, even allegro vivace.”
Pas de Deux: Amy Fusselman’s “Idiophone” Read More »
Since the very start of the Trump Presidency, American poets have rapidly mobilized in news-making numbers and noises to participate in protests across geographical and generational divides.
“Neoliberal Austerity and Left Melancholy,” by Vassilis Lambropoulos Read More »
“The brilliance of her engagement with this simple structure is an honesty as to composition’s value, or at least, the ways we ordinarily conceive of its value.”
An Act of Love from the Dream to Hamilton: Diana Hamilton’s “The Awful Truth” Read More »
Compression can be a radical point of view, a necessity of wandering and solitude. On the other hand, it risks reaching no one. Xie maneuvers her language with a fine-tooth comb, often beginning where many poets in our cluttered, digital age, conclude: deep inside a fully-fleshed thought or image.
Cracking the Lens: A Review of Jenny Xie’s “Eye Level” Read More »
The Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail’s new book of nonfiction, “The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq,” tells one aspect of this story: the kidnapping and enslavement of Yazidi women by Daesh. More specifically, The Beekeeper is about one man’s efforts to rescue these women through a network that he set up himself.
“We made room in our day for every star”: Dunya Mikhail’s “The Beekeeper” Read More »
I want to think about distance and Jane Gregory’s new book of poems, Yeah No. Or something more like gapping. A space between concepts charged with those concepts’ distance, what holds discourse together (and molecules, and planets).
Notes toward Jane Gregory’s “Yeah No” Read More »
Van Den Berg gives loveliness to the gruesome while opening up the novel’s world to all kinds of ghosts. The real emotional power of the novel, however, beyond the elegance of its language and the precision and momentum of its telling, builds from what ends up being a brutal moment of confrontation.
A Review of Laura Van Den Berg’s “The Third Hotel” Read More »
The Land Between Two Rivers calls to mind James Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” in that both books were written by “amateurs”—both Sleigh and Agee are/were first and foremost literary writers, yet their books are works of journalism.
Horizontal Knowledge: Tom Sleigh’s “The Land Between Two Rivers” Read More »
