Allen Curnow (1911–2001) was a dominant force in New Zealand letters and became an internationally acclaimed poet, anthologist, and critic.[1] Together, the 2017 Auckland University Press poems and biography provide a substantial (1120-page!) recognition of his achievement. Let me offer what follows as a kind of searching tribute.
Photo of Sandra Simonds (right) by Kira Derryberry.
Perhaps the highest praise I can say about Sandra Simonds’s Further Problems With Pleasure is that it gains deeper resonance on rereading in ways that can seduce me off of Facebook, get me off an ideological high horse (an occupational hazard), and make me want to respond in kind rather than trying to write a review that will inevitably water down the book’s intensities.
Photo of Alejandro Zambra (right) by the Instituto Cervantes de Tokio, via Wikimedia Commons.
Zambra’s interactive hybrid text, attentively translated by Megan McDowell, parodies the form of the Chilean Academic Aptitude Test — specifically from 1993, the year he took the test — which students would take to apply to Chilean universities.
In Multiple Choice, Alejandro Zambra asks us to remember a lot of things:
A) A lost love
B) A dead friend
C) A sixty-five-year-old woman who lost a breast to cancer, and never forgot she was missing a breast
D) A curfew imposed in Santiago, Chile, under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship
Lauren Levin’s second book, Justice Piece // Transmission, is comprised of two essayistic poems that continually untangle and reconstruct the web of contradictions that shape the speaker’s ever-complex, and always self-questioning, inner narrative.
Lauren Levin’s second book, Justice Piece // Transmission, is comprised of two essayistic poems that continually untangle and reconstruct the web of contradictions that shape the speaker’s ever-complex, and always self-questioning, inner narrative. In both pieces, Levin traces anxiety back and forth from its source: the social, material fabric that challenges any “total” understanding of what it means to be a person — a queer person — and a queer gender-fluid person — in the world right now.
Poetry makes nothing happen. Since 2008, it’s been pretty common for contemporary poetry and the discourse about it to swirl anxiously around this line from W. H. Auden. Nobody likes it; everybody quotes it.
Poetry makes nothing happen. Since 2008, it’s been pretty common for contemporary poetry and the discourse about it to swirl anxiously around this line from W. H. Auden. Nobody likes it; everybody quotes it. But in quoting it, nobody tries to argue for some distance between poetry and politics. It’s more like the question of whether poetry (and art more broadly) is or is not political has been answered by the movement of history — it is.
