Reviews

The revolution in 'Tender Buttons'

Although Three Lives and The Making of Americans were radical innovations, neither was as revolutionary as Tender Buttons (begun in 1912 and published in 1914).[1] Tender Buttons is the touchstone work of radical modernist poetry, the fullest realization of the turn to language and the most perfect realization of wordness, where word and object merge.

Loosening linking

An introduction to Jordan Scott

Andrew Zawacki

What follows is an introduction to Jordan Scott’s reading/screening at the University of Georgia on Wednesday, September 24, 2014. Sponsored by the creative writing program, the event was held at 7 p.m. in the Lab Room at Ciné, 234 West Hancock Avenue, in Athens, Georgia. Earlier that afternoon, Scott had visited Andrew Zawacki’s advanced undergraduate workshop “Graph & Photograph,” whose twenty-one students interviewed Scott about Decomp.

Poetics of critical cartography

A review of Sebastian Agudelo's 'Each Chartered Street'

Janice Sapigao

Each Chartered Street is a critical cartography of the poetics of space. The city of Philadelphia is the source of semiotics for this collection of poetry; this book maps, imagines, builds, and evokes the city as a city in its period of time. As a speaker with the eye of a Renaissance man, Agudelo captures contemporary Philadelphia and remixes the everyday of its citizens, neighbors, commuters, students, children, and families.

Re(con)figuring the moment

A review of 'It's Night in San Francisco But It's Sunny in Oakland'

Levi Bentley

What are your living conditions, do they feel stable?

Who do you consider your community, is it endangered?

Antonio Gamoneda and the ontology of disappearance

A review of 'Description of the Lie' and 'Gravestones'

Jose-Luis Moctezuma

Rust is the color of disappearance, the deintensification of metallic solidity. Seen in a different slant of light, rust produces a reintensification of color in the meeting of iron and oxygen, the proliferation of autumn in a congeries of breath, moisture, and steel. On the tongue rust acquires a taste: the bitterness of a disappearance, an evaporation that leaves behind the strange piquancy of material erosion. In Antonio Gamoneda’s Description of the Lie, rust invokes the beginning of a precipitous, painful knowledge, a forgetting that paradoxically initiates a splintering of presence into prismatic refractions that call attention to time’s invisible phenomena: