Reviews

Will wonders never cease?

Laynie Browne's 'You Envelop Me'

Aakash Suchak

I wanted to share both the narrowing and broadening of perception. I wanted to enter the space where all separations are illusory. — Laynie Browne, interview with Rusty Morrison

Under the beach, the office

On 'The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization'

Nate Preus
Photo by Jonny Erixon via Wikimedia Commons.

“Society can absorb almost anything that purports to attack it,” Kenneth Rexroth would conclude in the early 1960s, seeing few new political prospects in the wave of oppositional literature emerging from the Beat generation. One only had to look at the fate suffered by their rebellious literary predecessors: “Who laughed uproariously at the antics of the petty bourgeois upstart Père Ubu?

The poetry of a New York hour

A thousand singers on a mile-long stage

Stan Tymorek
Mile-Long Opera along the High Line in New York City, October 2018. Photo by Iwan Baan.

For six evenings in October 2018, the Mile-Long Opera was performed for free on the High Line, starting at 7:00 p.m. That time is significant: the opera was billed as “a biography of 7:00 p.m.” because the libretto and accompanying texts were based on interviews with hundreds of New Yorkers about the meaning of the hour when day gives way to night.

“No we don’t talk, but people get to know each other just by walking past each other all the time.”

Glimpsing the new normal

On Kristen Gallagher’s ‘85% True/Minor Ecologies’

Andy Martrich

Writing that tends to take an anthropocentric consideration of the physical world — e.g., a traditional nature writing that privileges human observation — implies a certain hierarchical separation between subject and material. It is the same assumption that leads to the glaring dismissal of other actants, especially those considered to be alien (i.e., not human). When the fantasy of privileged human experience is dissolved, there is an equitable condition, where people and their environments are slipped, or perhaps coerced, into substance.

New South new North

A review of 'América Invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets'

Riccardo Boglione
Right: Joaquín Torres-García, Uruguayan artist whose work originated the term “America Invertida,” in 1903. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

It is common that, when speaking about Uruguay and its culture outside the country, the name of Joaquín Torres-García — Uruguay’s most notorious visual artist — pops up, and now, after MoMA’s 2015 retrospective consecration, perhaps even more so. Here, for instance, it is found in the title of the anthology.