Reviews

This is the bodies: On Jena Osman and Rob Fitterman

For a few months in 2014, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presented a small exhibition of photographs by John Divola titled As Far As I Could Get. The exhibit encompassed one square room presenting prints from four different photographic series. In the title series, As Far As I Could Get, Divola has placed his camera on a tripod and set the shutter on a ten-second timer. As he starts the exposure’s countdown, he runs off into the distance marked by the camera’s gaze.

Complex orphaning

A review of Jose Perez Beduya's 'Throng'

Zach Savich

One could write an essay placing “The Search Party,” the first poem in Jose Perez Beduya’s debut collection, Throng, in the context of other poems of landscape and complex orphaning, from Blake’s “The Little Boy Lost” to Roethke’s “The Lost Son” to the William Matthews’s poem with which Beduya’s shares a title.

What might be unlocked

On Emily Abendroth's ']Exclosures['

Leah Souffrant

What comes to mind when you consider the word “exclosure”? Exposure? Enclosure? Exclusion? Language ripples out and collapses in, as if pressed and pulled at once. The title of Emily Abendroth’s new book of poems, published by Ahsahta Press, is ]Exclosures[, the curious word surrounded by reverse brackets, suggesting a bracketing and unbracketing that furthers this attention to the hinging/unhinging quality of Abendroth’s sometimes exquisitely wrought vocabulary. The title suggests a tight yet artfully unraveling language that is familiar yet strange.

Movements in 'The Unconditional' wasteland

An adventure in thinking

Arkava Das

Simon Jarvis’s The Unconditional: A Lyric, a single poem spanning 242 pages, might very well be the Waste Land of our times — only unsung, and way longer. Any number of light-hearted parallels can be drawn between Jarvis’s venture and The Waste Land as its modernist predecessor as a cartography of urban/consumerist experience, but a closer look and such comparisons collapse to differences and distances.

One foot in the real, one wing in the ether

A review of Julia Cohen's 'Collateral Light'

Laura Eve Engel

“I believe only in the evidence of what stirs my marrow,” Antonin Artaud writes in his “Manifesto in a Clear Language.” “I am visceral!” cries Julia Cohen in Collateral Light. There is evidence to believe it. To engage with this book is to be involved in the marrow-stirring process. To be plunged, arrow-like, into the breathing body and to pass clear through the bloody flank to the still, white bone.