Reviews - May 2023

My preferred pedagogy is 'Pathetic Literature'

Katherine Franco
Photo of Eileen Myles (left) by Kelly Writers House staff, March 2016.

A stingray doesn’t know the word for “pathetic.” A saint does not care if prayer renders her pathetic. Poets are pathetic because they devote themselves to form in the face of formlessness. (Are they? Do they?) These kinds of formulations and queries arise in reading Pathetic Literature, the momentous anthology edited by Eileen Myles and released by Grove Press in November 2022. 

'Here at the midpoint of my life'

A review of Kerri Webster's 'Lapis' and Jana Prikryl's 'Midwood'

Hannah LeClair

At first glance, Kerri Webster’s lyrical, lushly allusive Lapis and Jana Prikryl’s restrained, architectural Midwood make unlikely interlocutors — but both these 2022 collections situate themselves in the selva oscura of midlife and conduct their readers across the rough ground of fresh grief and ambiguous loss. Reading these two collections in dialogue offers a rich yield.