Reviews

The landscape at present

A review of Joseph Massey's 'At the Point'

Joseph Massey’s second ‘full-length’ collection of poems, At the Point, expands on the work in his previous Areas of Fog. While that collection’s detail of and attention to place finds a natural extension in At the Point, this collection finds not just an increasing awareness of the immediate presence of the Californian coastal landscape where he lives, but an active restraint in the face of the landscape. In the earliest lines of “Found”:

There’s little
to say. The landscape

'The problem with being numerous is a problem of memory'

A review of Joshua Ware's 'Homage to Homage to Homage to Creeley'

Jeff Alessandrelli

In a certain sense, to write an homage to something or someone is to admit a failure: one has neither the initiative, creativity nor means to attempt to create something new, something less overtly indebted to one’s specific interests. Paying homage displays a writer’s embrace of influence — especially artistic influence — and posits that it is so pervasive in our contemporary culture, so slyly insidious, that to try and write anything other than an homage (of some sort at least) is to be willfully, woefully ignorant.

The poetics of patience and mutiny

A review of Carmen Giménez Smith's 'The City She Was'

Julia Cohen

We have the terror of collectivity. And then we have the joy of collectivity. Carmen Giménez Smith reminds me that frenemies lurk around the Hard Rock Cafés of any city. But she also reminds me that we don’t have to go to the mall alone to pierce our ears and I’m relieved.

A review of 'Memory Wing'

Deborah Meadows

When I read an acquaintance’s life writing, it seems an act of friendship not only because my experience and impressions of that person can be confirmed or amplified, but I learn new things and am drawn to consider how that person structures, omits, references cultural matters, politicizes, or not, their lives. What does the work as fiction do?

On the undesirability of total bliss

A review-essay on Jon Leon

Lawrence Giffin

In a culture in which unfreedom is the object even of the desire for freedom, Elizabeth Zoë Lindsay Drink Fanta may offer the disappearance of desire (in the paradoxical form of the immediacy of everything touchable) not so much as a solution — the book is anything but a commentary on celebrity culture or a polemic against the culture industry — but as a factual index of the total poverty of everyday life.