Reviews

Cripping global queer, antiracist, and decolonial coalitions

A review of 'Crip Times' after 'Beauty is a Verb'

C. R. Grimmer

McRuer’s book, for instance, in many ways mirrors and departs from Beauty is a Verb: like the anthology, it opens with a historical excavation of policy change and arts-based responses, even overlapping with key figures, such as Petra Kuppers, who appear in Beauty is a Verb. However, it departs from an Americanist context of poetry, opening instead with a European-based history of neoliberal propaganda that he contrasts with emergent arts forms from crip activists.

A politics of austerity, I conclude, will always generate the compulsion to fortify borders and to separate a narrowly defined ‘us,’ in need of protection, from ‘them.’ Crip Times, and crip times, however, can and will only end with an aspiration to the outward-looking vision proffered by the indignant ones — Robert McRuer, Crip Times[1]

The posthumous now

On Hillary Gravendyk's 'The Soluble Hour'

Rodney Koeneke
Photo of Gravendyk (right) courtesy of Benjamin Burrill.

How do we read the work of poets who die young? Recent books by Joan Murray and Max Ritvo have me thinking about the question with a special intensity. Ritvo died of Ewing’s sarcoma in 2016 at just twenty-five, with two posthumous volumes — The Final Voicemails: Poems and Letters from Max — published last year. Murray, who won the Yale Younger Poets award, died at nearly the same age, in 1942; Drafts, Fragments, and Poems: The Complete Poetry has just been painstakingly edited by Farnoosh Fathi and published by NYRB Poets.

How do we read the work of poets who die young? Recent books by Joan Murray and Max Ritvo have me thinking about the question with a special intensity.

Black/women are alive after tomorrow

A review of 'Letters to the Future: Black Women/Radical Writing'

Tyrone Williams
Above: detail from cover art of ‘Letters to the Future.’

The most provocative mark in this anthology may be the virgule or forward slash that separates the last quarter of the title — Radical Writing — from the opening three quarters of the title — Letters to the Future: Black Women. I’ve analyzed elsewhere the function of the colon, a staple in academic article and book titles, so I won’t discuss that here.

Geoffrey G. O'Brien's subjunctive 'dividuals

'Experience in Groups'

Simona Schneider
Author photo (right) courtesy of Geoffrey G. O’Brien.

O’Brien’s “groups” are not Jonathan Edwards’s congregation or assembly. Nor are they the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie “crowds” of Gustave Le Bon, who argued there was no culture in social movements (only unconscious religious structures), though we do get “crowds” akin to the “clouds” of Charles Baudelaire, Constantin Guy, and Walter Benjamin. Nor are they Marxist “masses” or “unions,” or the twentieth-century “association” or “league” (Women’s, of Nations). 

Groups as period style

The scholar's blush

Shame as method in 'Lyric Shame'

Jess Shollenberger
Photo by Anthony Easton, via <a href= https://www.flickr.com/photos/pinkmoose/26
Photo by Anthony Easton, via flickr.

Lyric Shame (2014), a method-driven reappraisal of the mid- to late-twentieth-century “lyric” poem, looks to readers’ shame as an interpretive device. Shame: that blushing state that finds us thinking of what others must be thinking and/or self-caught in the act of wanting something (something others do not think we should be wanting); an awareness of exposure or of being seen by others; a social signpost; a readable heat.