Frankie Barnet on Shelly Oria: NEW YORK 1 TEL AVIV 0
NEW YORK 1 TEL AVIV 0, Shelly Oria. Bond Street Books (2014) “I think, who is this person? That me who isn’t Israeli and isn’t American, isn’t gay and isn’t straight— who is she?” (26). New York 1, Tel Aviv 0, Shelly Oria’s debut collection of short stories, is a book about intersections...
Prathna Lor on Laura Riding: Contemporaries and Snobs
Contemporaries and Snobs. Laura Riding. Edited by Laura Heffernan and Jane Malcolm. University of Alabama Press, 2014 “In theory, poetry has officially passed” (40). So proclaims Laura Riding in her opening essay to Contemporaries and Snobs, “Poetry and the Literary Universe.” Originally published in 1928, this new edition, edited by Laura Heffernan and Jane Malcolm,...
Daniel Zomparelli: In praise of three great first books
Misadventures by Nicholas Grider A Strange Object Press Short Fiction Grider writes a book that is about form, about structure just as much as narrative. He takes characters who wouldn’t normally be able to tell a story but makes the narration work. His stories give you just enough clues to let you settle into the...
Kate Sterns on Ian McEwan
The Children Act by Ian McEwan Review by Kate Sterns London. Trinity term one week old. Implacable June weather. This echo of the famous opening to Dickens’ masterpiece, Bleak House serves as the beginning to Ian McEwan’s latest novel, The Children Act. The reference signals, or ought to, that the reader is in for a...
E Martin Nolan on Erina Harris: The Stag Head Spoke
The Stag Head Spoke, Erina Harris. Buckrider Books, 2014 The Stag Head Spoke is a difficult book to grasp – perhaps it is ultimately ungraspable – but even on the first bewildering read, it’s well worth the effort. The visceral power of the words, especially the musical effects, are obvious from the start. The Stag...
Jordan Davis on Ken Babstock
“The Brave,” a poem in Ken Babstock’s third collection, Airstream Land Yacht, contains a good account of the disdain poets feel for work from outside the tribe: It wasn’t quite right. Lacked focus. Might have tickled the kids, the simple, Or those others on that other coast, but not us. It wasn’t what we liked....
Jake Kennedy on Lisa Robertson
“You Decide to Meditate on the Condition of a Seam”—Notes On Lisa Robertson’s Cinema of the Present it’s not the new. it is what is yet not known, thought, seen, touched but really what is not. and that is. —Eva Hesse -Kmac visited Coach House just as Cinema Of The Present was being printed and...
Diego Báez on Paul Vermeersch
Paul Vermeersch, Don’t Let It End Like This Tell Them I Said Something, ECW 2014 Like Y2K survivalists and street corner preachers, Paul Vermeersch seems to insist the apocalypse has been upon us for a while, now. However, unlike frightful doomsdayers, Vermeersch revels in this proclamation and, contrary to popular imagination, does not include cerebrophagic...
Danielle Bobker: Belle, A New View of 18th Century Racism
Belle: A New View of Eighteenth-Century Racism by Danielle Bobker Belle (2013), directed by Amma Asante and written by Misan Sagay, tells stories that are by turns deeply familiar and completely fresh. You need only to have read a Jane Austen (1775-1817) novel or two, or seen any of the movie adaptations, to guess the...
Alex Porco on Gary Barwin: Moon Baboon Canoe
In an interview from June 2010, Canadian poet Gary Barwin expressed his discomfort with being labeled as a surrealist writer and performer. In the early twenty-first century, the term Surrealism risks mystifying as much as it illuminates. “I always have some misgivings about the term when applied outside of its original context,” explains Barwin. [I]t...
Heather Cromarty on Chris Tysh: Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic
Each English version of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal bears the mark of its translator; each one swings so wildly that sometimes a poem is barely recognizable from one version to the next. “Aux objets répugnants nous trouvons des appas”; “We yield, enthralled, to things repugnant, base”; “In repugnant things we discover charms”; Robert Lowell’s...
Eric Schmaltz on Divya Victor: Things To Do With Your Mouth
Things to Do With Your Mouth (Les Figues, 2014) is full-throated and bursting. Published in April 2014 as part of TrenchArt: The Logistics Series by Les Figues Press, this is the newest book from Troll-Thread’s sharp-witted former co-conspirator, Divya Victor. With intent to interrogate the long history of fear of women’s voices, Victor employs appropriation and...
