Kelly Liu

Editorial assistant Kelly Liu reviews three 2020 titles from Wesleyan University Press, each touching on memory and loss: Now It’s Dark by Peter Gizzi, Un-American by Hafizah Geter, and A Forest of Names by Ian Boyden. Of Gizzi's book, Kelly writes: Now It’s Dark begins with a dedication: “for my brother Tom // also gone.” In the face of unrelenting, constantly encroaching threat of mortality, Gizzi pens a collection of poetry that mourns those who passed and those who will continue to. In a dark world inhabited by ghosts, simultaneously aftermath and augury, Gizzi wades through physicality with an acute sense of its already-absence. Perhaps its most haunting line, “Say what’s a grammar when you is no longer you,” questions the limits of language: how can language work when the object of reference no longer exists materially, when the ‘you’ who was once alive and breathing becomes the abstract ‘you’ left behind in thought? As it seeks to preserve some semblance of life, to write the phenomenological world into the world of poetry, Gizzi’s work is a continuous attempt to inscribe: “I want to tell you this isn’t just all song. // I want to say this scrap of paper had sky in it.”

Editorial assistant Kelly Liu breaks down the poetics of the three translated booklets of Ideas Have No Smell: Three Belgian Surrealist Booklets, ed. and trans. M. Kasper: Transfigured Publicity by Paul Nougé, Abstractive Treatise on Obeuse by Paul Colinet, and For Balthazar by Louis Scutenaire.

Editorial assistant Kelly Liu makes her capsule reviews debut with three recent poetry titles: Anybody by Ari Banias, Civilization Makes Me Lonely by Jennifer Nelson, and Commodore by Jacqueline Waters.