Reviews

Permission to be a poet

A review of Eileen Myles's 'Inferno (A Poet's Novel)'

Denise Dooley

Inferno: A Poet’s Novel begins as a retelling of Eileen Myles’s tough-girl antics in 1970s New York. She plays, at first, a stomping, horny girl-tornado, a lost Dante high-minded enough to keep yammering on about that likeness. In this story she is very broke but good at it. She sells fake subway token slugs, borrows dollars, works in bars, makes rich friends, steals food off trucks. She is our girl hero.

Ecologies of the margin

A review of 'Hidden Agendas: Unreported Poetics'

Jeroen Nieuwland

Hidden Agendas: Unreported Poetics, edited by Louis Armand, collects essays by poets about marginal poetries and poets; recalling John Ashbery’s series of lectures on unknown poets, Other Traditions. Hidden Agendas does not purport to be some kind of conclusive collection of marginal poetics; its premise, rather, is refreshingly contingent on personal proclivity: “a number of writers / editors were invited to reflect on a poet, a group of poets, or a poetics from the last half-century, that they deemed of personal significance and which they felt to have been underestimated, neglected, or overlooked. Consequently, each contribution is subjective and critical” (4).

An abecedarian

A review of Joseph Harrington's 'Things Come On {an amneoir}'

Matt Reeck

A
Amneoir. An amnesiac’s memoir. What would this look like?

Art. (See Collage.)

B
From Alan Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy, translated by Louise Burchill (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011):

“There are only bodies and languages except that there are truths. […] Taking the form of sciences, arts, politics and love, these ‘things,’ endowed with a transworldly and universal value, are what I name truths.” (22)

Serious play

A review of Yahia Lababidi's 'Trial by Ink'

Andrew Madigan

As the subtitle — “from Nietzsche to Belly Dancing” — suggests, Yahia Lababidi’s essays wiggle their hips in many directions, from sacred to arcane, from pop to professorial. What he admires in Wilde is just this, the writer’s “ability to play with serious subjects. To make light of them” (12). In fact, the true subject of Lababidi’s writing would seem to be these poignant interchanges between seemingly disparate spheres.