Reviews

'Say what you know'

A review of Eleanor Wilner's 'A Tourist in Hell'

Eleanor Rand Wilner’s poems are adventures. These adventures include almost every subject imaginable: war, peace, nature, knitting, mountain climbing, insects and intellectuals. It is an adventure into the labyrinth of an amazing mind. Each poem starts off directly enough; soon you don’t know where the poem is going; then it leads from one surprise to another; until the whole evolves organically into one or more revelations that expand your understanding of what was broached at the beginning of the poem. She writes with the eyes of someone who just got there. But she arrives there with a depth of intelligence. For instance, the poem that begins The Girl with Bees in Her Hair prepares us as though “everything is starting up again.”

Hundred-spired muse

A review of 'From a Terrace in Prague: A Prague Poetry Anthology'

Ryan Scott

Prague has pervasive literary associations, a fact not overlooked by the hawkers of souvenirs and proprietors of restaurants. In the center you can buy a Kafka mug or t-shirt and have lunch in a pub emblazoned with images from Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk. If that’s not to your taste, there is also a restaurant named after Rilke. Stephan Delbos’s anthology attempts to go beyond this tourist veneer. Though the anthology is styled as a guide, the intentions are bolder.

Permission to be a poet

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

Denise Dooley

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'

Jeroen Nieuwland

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 Traditions. Hidden 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}'

Matt Reeck

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)