Reviews

Playing Stein

Tender Buttons is the future. Neither cipher nor code, the grammar of Tender Buttons forces the reader to play Stein. Stein’s obsession with perspective, her collection of objects, food, rooms, produces a scene of constraints (the rules of the game): a discrete spatial field where coordinates shift as the text’s gravity swerves. A game board. No, a bored game.

After Stein's closet

A tender reading from 'Tender Buttons'

Angela Carr

I read “A Substance in a Cushion” as a sexy, humorous love poem that plays on a little calamity and a little calm in the closet. Its sweetness and its resolution are very likely embodied in the same hand that does the sewing.

Twenty-two on ‘Tender Buttons’

Julia Bloch

For the 100th anniversary of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, published in a corrected centennial edition by City Lights Books in 2014, Jacket2 invited a number of writers to pen “microreviews” — short, impressionistic, discursive, or momentary reflections on the book which first appeared in 1914 in a print run of 1,000 by Claire Marie and has been republished since by Green Integer, Gordon, Sun and Moon, and others.

Recreate that thing!

Mia You

Gertrude Stein's gustatory sonics

Karen Volkman

'100 years of reading and unreading'

Joshua Schuster

'Tender Buttons' at 100

'Is there. That was a question. There was no certainty.'

Andrea Quaid

Breed that

Sarah Posman

Unlikening 'Tender Buttons'

Bob Perelman

A moment in teaching 'Tender Buttons'

Sawako Nakayasu

If I reviewed her (excerpt)

Tracie Morris

Gertrude Stein sets a table

Dee Morris

What I see in Stein's 'Tender Buttons'

Jason Mitchell

The index of 'Tender Buttons'

Astrid Lorange

Stein's spatial poetics

Star-light and 'Rooms'

Sueyeun Juliette Lee

'Tender Buttons': A pedagogy

erica kaufman

Dear Gertrude

Rachel Galvin

Is it so a noise to be

'Tender Buttons' and noise poetics

Seth J. Forrest

Reading tenderly

Michael Farrell

The singularity shows

Marcella Durand

Stein's wedding cake

Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Playing Stein

EC Maxe Crandall

After Stein's closet

A tender reading from 'Tender Buttons'

Angela Carr

'A Long Dress'

Laynie Browne

The revolution in 'Tender Buttons'

Charles Bernstein

'A Long Dress'

Laynie Browne

A long dress walks independently, down your street, any street. The “current that presents a long line” is also your leg, an ambling thought-object. A long dress in Stein is shorn, woven of substantial “crackle.” Use it to carry live ingredients, figments, ammunition, endearments, “machinery.” Employ a long dress to navigate “current” or “serene length.”

Engage a long dress to compile the histories of a “necessary waist.”

The revolution in 'Tender Buttons'

Charles Bernstein

Although Three Lives and The Making of Americans were radical innovations, neither was as revolutionary as Tender Buttons (begun in 1912 and published in 1914).[1] Tender Buttons is the touchstone work of radical modernist poetry, the fullest realization of the turn to language and the most perfect realization of wordness, where word and object merge.