Reviews

'The problem with being numerous is a problem of memory'

A review of Joshua Ware's 'Homage to Homage to Homage to Creeley'

In a certain sense, to write an homage to something or someone is to admit a failure: one has neither the initiative, creativity nor means to attempt to create something new, something less overtly indebted to one’s specific interests. Paying homage displays a writer’s embrace of influence — especially artistic influence — and posits that it is so pervasive in our contemporary culture, so slyly insidious, that to try and write anything other than an homage (of some sort at least) is to be willfully, woefully ignorant.

The poetics of patience and mutiny

A review of Carmen Giménez Smith's 'The City She Was'

Julia Cohen

We have the terror of collectivity. And then we have the joy of collectivity. Carmen Giménez Smith reminds me that frenemies lurk around the Hard Rock Cafés of any city. But she also reminds me that we don’t have to go to the mall alone to pierce our ears and I’m relieved.

A review of 'Memory Wing'

Deborah Meadows

When I read an acquaintance’s life writing, it seems an act of friendship not only because my experience and impressions of that person can be confirmed or amplified, but I learn new things and am drawn to consider how that person structures, omits, references cultural matters, politicizes, or not, their lives. What does the work as fiction do?

On the undesirability of total bliss

A review-essay on Jon Leon

Lawrence Giffin

In a culture in which unfreedom is the object even of the desire for freedom, Elizabeth Zoë Lindsay Drink Fanta may offer the disappearance of desire (in the paradoxical form of the immediacy of everything touchable) not so much as a solution — the book is anything but a commentary on celebrity culture or a polemic against the culture industry — but as a factual index of the total poverty of everyday life.

Anarchic inventions: On making poetry present

David Antin and Charles Bernstein

Gerald Bruns

How does (or should) one regard the work of innovative or experimental poets whom one has been reading for nearly forty years? The question is, to be sure, something of a mare’s nest — not one question but several, starting perhaps with the old problem of whether the terms “modernism,” “avant-garde,” or even “art” itself are not inherently defined by term limits. The artist Lawrence Weiner once said: “When my work is assimilated into the art context, it will change something. I hope it won’t be considered viable living art in ten years.