Reviews

Fits of imagination

A review of Thomas Meyer's 'Beowulf'

In being caught between two times, that of composition and circulation, Thomas Meyer’s translation finds itself in harmony with its source text. Meyer translated Beowulf in the 1970s, after completing a 1969 senior thesis at Bard translating the rest of the surviving Anglo-Saxon poetic corpus. Our introduction to Meyer’s electric translation, however, is more recent, as it was released by punctum books, an open-access and print-on-demand publisher, only in 2012.

Transitionary framings, a case

A review of Geoffrey Gatza's 'House of Forgetting'

Michael Gessner

For readers of Gatza who have already come to expect the unexpected; for those fascinated with emerging innovation in book-structured polygraphies, then House of Forgetting is yet another contribution to what is becoming a prodigious oeuvre.

Drenched

A review of Ethel Rackin's 'The Forever Notes'

Elizabeth Savage

“My Sister’s Drawings of Trees,” from the third and final section of Ethel Rackin’s The Forever Notes, concludes in lines that could serve as a primer to the book’s development of the lyric, especially Rackin’s amendments to its use as an instrument of discovery and dissent.

Standstill moments

A review of Piotr Gwiazda's 'Messages'

Robert Manaster

In his first book, Gargarin Street (2005), Piotr Gwiazda, after “meandering slowly from nowhere to nowhere”[1] in a self-deprecating manner, after revealing his motto “Give Chance a chance” (36), and after postulating,

What if the script of human life is full of typos,

missteps, mishaps, false starts, false alarms,
wrong turns, dead ends, distractions, digressions —[2]

'This language materialized'

A review of Mary Burger's 'Then Go On'

Nicole Trigg

Mary Burger, right. Photo by Alan Bernheimer.

In her new book Then Go On, Mary Burger explores how to occupy space and time with language and thought, how to expand the self, transgressing its borders, how to exhaust thought, how to suspend time and the self, and how to exceed language with itself.

As if a harbinger, the following text presented itself a few months prior to Burger’s book, handwritten in kid’s scrawl and posted in a ground-floor window in my neighborhood:

tital
a chrip to chin