Reviews

Contradictory equivalents

A review of Vincent Broqua’s ‘Recovery’

Vincent Broqua’s first book in English — I hasten to specify that it would be much more appropriate to say in “expanded English,” since the work is a linguistic hybrid in more than one way — is the perfect demonstration that US and English-speaking interest in French writing is still very lively, if not intense. Not necessarily in the domain of mainstream prose fiction, but undoubtedly in the smaller but infinitely much more exciting field of cutting-edge experimental writing, of which this publication is a superb as well as extreme example.

In The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading (2018), Edmund White, a longtime lover of France and French literature and culture, makes en passant the following observation: “Mine was probably the last American generation that took France seriously. We wanted to learn the language, the fashions, the heritage. We learned to cook French from Julie Child, to think French from Michel Foucault, to dress French in whatever stylish Parisian way we could afford.

Who wouldn’t?

CoReflecting OnWith

“We Want It All” editors Andrea Abi-Karam (left) and Kay Gabriel (right). Photo: Lix Z.

There they are now. — Zack de la Rocha, “We Want it All” 

At times we resist to exist — in order to.

And yes, We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, coedited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel, “a collection of formally inventive writing by trans poets against capital and empire.”

CohabitUS: Toward covival

A review of/reflection on 'Help' by Claudia Rankine

April Matthis (right foreground) and “Help” cast, 2022. Photo: Kate Glicksberg. Courtesy The Shed.

Covival, not just survival. 

There are many chairs and no tables in this depressingly uplifting play, Help, which is about a new table we need right NOW, “NOW that is the ‘n-word,’” as the play says: a kind of roundtable, virtual and actual, where we can all sit around to talk “us,” cohabitus, especially the souls of White folks.

My preferred pedagogy is 'Pathetic Literature'

Photo of Eileen Myles (left) by Kelly Writers House staff, March 2016.

A stingray doesn’t know the word for “pathetic.” A saint does not care if prayer renders her pathetic. Poets are pathetic because they devote themselves to form in the face of formlessness. (Are they? Do they?) These kinds of formulations and queries arise in reading Pathetic Literature, the momentous anthology edited by Eileen Myles and released by Grove Press in November 2022. 

'Here at the midpoint of my life'

A review of Kerri Webster's 'Lapis' and Jana Prikryl's 'Midwood'

At first glance, Kerri Webster’s lyrical, lushly allusive Lapis and Jana Prikryl’s restrained, architectural Midwood make unlikely interlocutors — but both these 2022 collections situate themselves in the selva oscura of midlife and conduct their readers across the rough ground of fresh grief and ambiguous loss. Reading these two collections in dialogue offers a rich yield.