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review: results 1–9 of 9

A Review of Rachel Cusk's Arlington Park  by ALLISON ELLIOTT

Any reader who believes the suburbs to be a cultural and spiritual wasteland will have their prejudices confirmed. And yet, Cusk's great talent as a writer is to complicate these tired notions and make them fresh and engaging. Her Desperate Housewives are not stereotypes, but unique and sympathetic characters. Cusk is masterful at capturing the ordinary moments of family life.

A Kind of Listening Seems To Be Answering His Sight: Ralph Angel's Exceptions and Melancholies, Poems 1986-2006  by MIGUEL MURPHY

22 July 2007
Vol. 7, No. 2
review of poetry

Fulfilling the promise of his early work, Angel's new book is characterized by deep consciousness, the rigors of his syntax anchoring his voice. His new poems exemplify what is true of the rest of his work collected here as he summons Self, human presence, from the collision of worldly details. If we exist in the noise of body, and commerce, and community, Angel's work captures sublimated landscapes of deep feeling and spiritual incident.

Everyday Muse: A Review of Christine Stewart-Nuñez's Unbound & Branded  by LAURA MADELINE WISEMAN

20 June 2007
Vol. 7, No. 2
review of poetry

I can say honestly that Kate Moss and I have never been friends. Even when young, vulnerable, and with loads of cultural literacy while perusing slinky images splayed in Vogue and Cosmo, I simply couldn't have picked Kate Moss from a line-up. I'm not even sure I'd want to, even today. And yet Unbound & Branded has given me a different Kate Moss. A Kate Moss who can "tear down the wall," "peel back the universe," "spend your whole paycheck on yourself," and even, "tell the boss / to fuck off."

If Eurydice Is Your Father: Beckian Fritz Goldberg's Lie Awake Lake  by MIGUEL MURPHY

11 March 2007
Vol. 7, No. 1
review of poetry

A poet must try and make sense of the enormity of loss that steeps our life with difficult meaning. The great achievement of Fritz Goldberg's text is that grief remains unanswerable and alluring… Where we might expect heavy-handedness and painful confessionalism, Fritz Goldberg's poems are buoyant, and like the title of her collection, filled with linguistic, frolicsome concentration.

A Night of Theater: A Review of Alberto Ríos's The Theater of Night  by D. ANTWAN STEWART

18 January 2007
Vol. 6, No. 4
review of poetry

We are revealed in its language and Ríos's "theater of experience," which is unavoidably common to us all. And how fortunate we are for having Ríos as not only our usher but our poet.

A Review of Kathleen Flenniken's Famous  by JEREMY HATCH

29 November 2006
Vol. 6, No. 3
review of poetry

The third volume to emerge from the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and the first collection of its author's work, Famous is an assured and refreshingly self-possessed volume of poems, a rich offering of plain but musical language and understated irony

A Review of Victor Pelevin's The Helmet of Horror: The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur  by SPENCER DEW

25 November 2006
Vol. 6, No. 3
review of fiction

Reading this novel renders one a fly on a digital wall, listening in as half-baked undergraduates urgently chat about everything from the role of repressed postwar frustration as a motivating factor for tentacle-rape manga porn to whether the word "beige" can signify the same thing to two people in two places. All of which, in less skilled treatment, could be unbearable, but Pelevin's secret is pacing.

A Review of Wilhelm Genazino's The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt  by SPENCER DEW

This is the gift of the book, in the end, a balance between philosophy and poetry, helter-skelter wit and calm sensual pauses.

"Tender Hooks" Refuse to Soften: A Review of Beth Ann Fennelly's Tender Hooks  by GENEVIEVE BETTS

2 September 2004
Vol. 4, No. 3
review of poetry

History's typecast of "the mother" breeds thoughts of the bored housewife, entertaining herself with embroidery, pastel aprons, and flip hairdos. Herstory relates a more honest and complex definition of the mother, much like the work of Beth Ann Fennelly's poems in Tender Hooks.

 

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