If this collection didn’t have one again questioning the origin and provenance of poetry (other than the intellect or empirical self), the poems would be getting short shrift.
Madness, Rack, and Honey is a gift from a rigorous intellect, unflinching critic, and a big old sloppy heart. Ruefle has created a work of poetry from the daunting task of writing about it.
A particular essay in Siri Hustvedt’s new collection Living, Thinking, Looking encapsulates much of what is equally intriguing and frustrating about her as an essayist. Called “Outside the Mirror,” the…
Aaron Shurin writes piercingly lovely poetry that ‘s multidimensional and insists on being read aloud, though its eloquence is equally powerful on the page without sound...
In one of the stories in Roberto Bolaño’s new collection The Secret of Evil, the symbolist painter Gustave Moreau, whose arresting and beastly Jupiter and Seleme graces the American jacket…
I saw Lucie Blackman last week. She was walking down the street in Austin, Texas near the Congress Avenue Bridge. Then I saw her a few days later in the…
In Sebald’s Across the Land and Water, the theme is clear. In these collections, we have named men and women (names) traveling, staying in hotels, unanchored, exiled and lost, seemingly forever, from their home.
In the early morning hours of August 21st, 1863, 26-year-old Captain William Quantrill led several hundred Confederate guerillas into the town of Lawrence, Kansas, a hotbed of abolitionist support, in…
Parker’s voice is so singular and strong that I don’t question it, even when it relies on wit, and in return, Parker rewards me for following him when I least expect it.
The World Without You, Joshua Henkin’s new book, is that rare breed: the twenty-first century domestic novel. Henkin’s characters, the Frankels – think Salinger’s Glass family, but more pretentious –…
Most of the outrage surrounding the erosion of the English language centers on the misuse of punctuation. Lynne Truss professed the desire to carry a red marker with her everywhere…
“A note exists between two notes of music, between two facts exists a fact, between two grains of sand no matter how close together there exists an interval of space,…