Reviews

Dorothea Lasky, it’s unbelievable

A review of 'Black Life' and 'Awe'

I couldn’t sleep tonight so I started a new diary. On the first page I wrote the following quotation about Iceland, by Eileen Myles:

Most likely we travel to exist in an analogue to our life’s dilemmas. It’s like a spaceship. The work for the traveler is making the effort to understand that the place you are moving through is real and the solution to your increasingly absent problems is forgetting. To see them in a burst as you are vanishing into the world. Travel is not transcendence. It’s immanence. It’s trying to be here.

Art-trash

On Chelsey Minnis and CAConrad

Joyelle McSweeney

CAConrad is the son of white trash asphyxiation whose childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. — author’s bio

This is a cut-down chandelier …
And it is like coughing at the piano before you start playing a terrible waltz …
The past should go away but it never does …
And it is like a swimming pool at the bottom of the stairs … — Chelsea Minnis, Poemland

What a trash
To annihilate each decade. — Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus”

The argument

As these epigraphs so clearly emblematize, Art is asphyxiation; annihilation; anachronism; inebriation; something “cut-down”; something shoplifted; like trash, it makes more of itself; like the past, it should go away but it never does. Like a cough, it doubles up or doubles down on terribleness.

Humanitarian strategies for ecosystem stabilization

A review of 're : evolution'

James Sherry

E.J. McAdams

In correspondance surrounding this review of Kim Rosenfield’s re : evolution, James Sherry relayed his excitement at the potential for publishing a “collaborative review in a collaborative technology.” Jacket2 is pleased to present that review, composed by Sherry and E.J. McAdams employing the track changes function in Microsoft Word.

This is not a book of surfaces

A review of 'The Book of Beginnings and Endings'

Christopher Lura

The Book of Beginnings and Endings by Jenny Boully is a deceptively straightforward book that poses a number of fascinating questions for the literary imagination to grapple with. Although the book is ostensibly made up of just what the title implies, beginnings and endings, when an entire book “consists” of beginnings and endings, it necessarily brings up the question about what a beginning or ending actually is, since, from a certain perspective, beginnings are not beginnings if they do not have endings, and vice versa.

A careful assemblage

A review of 'Nox'

Lorraine Martinuik

Anne Carson’s newest book, Nox, seduced me immediately. The book in its clamshell case is a physical, touchable thing. Nox is an accordion-fold book, one forty-foot long page, folded to roughly the size of a half sheet of letter paper. It’s a tactile and visual delight to open the lid of the case and extract the stacked accordion-fold volume, to scan its palette of sepia tones and late, small bursts of color. Reading it is a sensory experience; the composition — a collage of text, photographs and drawings — engages the eye, and the narrative is engrossing and moving.