Reviews - February 2012

Permission to be a poet

A review of Eileen Myles's 'Inferno (A Poet's Novel)'

Inferno: A Poet’s Novel begins as a retelling of Eileen Myles’s tough-girl antics in 1970s New York. She plays, at first, a stomping, horny girl-tornado, a lost Dante high-minded enough to keep yammering on about that likeness. In this story she is very broke but good at it. She sells fake subway token slugs, borrows dollars, works in bars, makes rich friends, steals food off trucks. She is our girl hero.

Ecologies of the margin

A review of 'Hidden Agendas: Unreported Poetics'

Hidden Agendas: Unreported Poetics, edited by Louis Armand, collects essays by poets about marginal poetries and poets; recalling John Ashbery’s series of lectures on unknown poets, Other TraditionsHidden Agendas does not purport to be some kind of conclusive collection of marginal poetics; its premise, rather, is refreshingly contingent on personal proclivity: “a number of writers / editors were invited to reflect on a poet, a group of poets, or a poetics from the last half-century, that they deemed of personal significance and which they felt to have been underestimated, neglected, or overlooked. Consequently, each contribution is subjective and critical” (4).

An abecedarian

A review of Joseph Harrington's 'Things Come On {an amneoir}'

A
Amneoir. An amnesiac’s memoir. What would this look like?

Art. (See Collage.)

B
From Alan Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy, translated by Louise Burchill (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011):

“There are only bodies and languages except that there are truths. […] Taking the form of sciences, arts, politics and love, these ‘things,’ endowed with a transworldly and universal value, are what I name truths.” (22)