I’ve read more this year than I have in the past several years but still, nowhere near what I used to read in a given year. I understand, if I…
Category: Reviews
Who Built That? Modern Houses, Princeton Architectural Press, 2014 My three year-olds are technically way too young for this, but I bought it for them anyhow because we already look…
Like all lists, this is incomplete, even as a list of my favorite poetry things of the year. It’s incomplete because I often lend, or give books that would be…
The Scarborough by Michael Lista (Signal Editions, 2014) When Kenneth Goldsmith appeared on The Colbert Report to promote his book Seven American Deaths and Disasters, Stephen Colbert stated that…
Light Light, Julie Joosten. BookThug (2013) Stillness is the new fantasy – a rest in the garden after work or an upcoming vacation – promising an answer to the madness…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“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…
“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,…