Reviews
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The Poems of Jesus Christ, by Willis Barnstone
Born in 1927, Willis Barnstone is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Indiana University and an admired translator . His rendering of The Poems of St John of the Cross is rightly revered by believers, non believers, scholars and…
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Girl In Cap and Gown by Harriet Levin
Filmgoers this year who saw the documentary The Cave of Forgotten Dreams in 3-D (or not) entered the prehistoric Chauvet caves of Southern France in a stunning modern way. The labor to return to the stone womb felt transformative but…
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Zona, by Geoff Dyer
To appreciate Zona, Geoff Dyer’s twelfth book, you’ll need to watch the Andrei Tarkovsky film, Stalker, among the most treasured and troubling movies in the history of cinema. If you’ve never seen it, you’ll need to take your time with…
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Gaze by Christopher Howell
In the opening poem of Christopher Howell’s Gaze, “Home Stretch,” he concludes with, “Receive me. Here are my silver / wings, in accordance with custom. Inside of them / leaves have been falling all these years.” And as readers, we…
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Any Day Now, by Terry Bisson
“In this universe the night was falling…” So muses Clayton Bewley, the uprooted Kentuckian at the center of Terry Bisson’s latest novel Any Day Now. It’s a line Clay plucks from Arthur C. Clarke, and it underscores the novel’s blend…
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Fast Machine by Elizabeth Ellen
“Nothing Elizabeth Ellen has ever written has ever been political, ever.” At least according to the four teenage girls in this vimeo book trailer called “A Brief Bio by Elizabeth Ellen” on the book’s promo page. Don’t believe it for…
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A Brilliant Button Without Any Cloth
The promised west in The Oregon Trail IS The Oregon Trail is an amalgam of bootstrap romance, wilderness bordered by suburban sprawl, death, and the ferocity of natural processes.
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I Used to be Epic Spittle
It’s the project of the impossible, then, that makes Yau’s new collection so provocative and provoking, so worth reading, even for a reader’s or poet’s temperament that might be different from Yau’s.
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The Greatest Show
In this intricately woven short story collection, The Greatest Show, Michael Downs tells the sad long story of crumbling American cities through the lens of a tragic circus fire of 1944.
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Held Together By Sinews
Kinsella describes; he does not prescribe. He rests less comfortably in his retreat than Thoreau and without the surety that he lives an exemplary life.
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A History of Potential
In his new history of the experimental writing movement, Oulipo, Many Subtle Channels, Daniel Levin Becker goes where few have gone.
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From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant
Alex Gilvarry’s debut novel throws us into a complex world of a young Filipino immigrant who is unexpectedly detained by Homeland Security.