Reviews - April 2011

How surfaces can be tweaked and spun

A review of 'New Depths of Deadpan'

Although I haven’t read it since I was fifteen, I vividly remember how the hero of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, a human being raised among Martians, was able to mentally take hold of anything — a bad guy, an ashtray, a car — and effortlessly turn it out of existence, so that it was “ninety degrees from everything else.” I had forgotten all about this until I was reminded of it on almost every page of Michael Gizzi’s New Depths of Deadpan. Lines begin someplace intelligible and just — turn, until they seem to be perpendicular to everything in existence. “These here blew in from the French / Revolution to stack up over this canary yellow hum cover” (29) Gizzi writes, or, “A popular corrective to self-focusing // would be love, and your beloved // a tugboat with a dab of Cornish hysteria” (62).

The importance of nouns

A review of 'N7ostradamus'

Matt Reeck

Question Set 1.

Does N7ostradamus, by referring explicitly to Nostradamus’s Les Prophéties — i.e., the Original or in my arcane coding system, Original One (Nostradamus), or OO(N) — and by offering nothing that the reader can decipher as urgent/actionable prophecy, undermine the original and its prophetic pretense/intents?

Multilingual Latin American poetries

Candice Amich

The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry opens with an image from the Maya Codex. The figure of a female scribe, her head bowed to her writing task, commands the field of the first page. Undeciphered glyphs float before her bent head. She heralds the mysterious transmissions that all poetries in translation augur. Beyond signaling the acts of translation that make up the anthology, the female scribe locates the origins of Latin American poetries in pre-Columbian writing systems.

An identity in relation

Anne Tardos on absence

Kit Robinson

Grief is the most deeply personal condition, and yet it is also the most universal, extending even beyond human experience to the animal kingdom. To write out of grief is equally to find a way out of it. In the curious case of Anne Tardos’s I Am You, it is also to affirm loss as foundational, or rather to affirm that there is no foundation, to affirm that the removal of the other by whom one’s life has been shaped and sustained reveals an emptiness at the very root of existence.

Registers of breath: On origins and concession

A review of 'The Concession Stand: Exaptation at the Margins'

Daniel Bratton

Several pages into her new book The Concession Stand: Exaptation at the Margins, Arpine Konyalian Grenier refers to William Bronk’s Life Supports (1981) and Manifest; And Furthermore (1987). Given the flood of information with which she ceaselessly inundates the reader — dovetailing with her decidedly postmodern sensibility and concomitant narrative technique — it would be easy enough to take these allusions simply as further evidence of Grenier’s wide-ranging literary interests and remarkable erudition in general.