Reviews

A literary walking uphill

A review of 'Not Blessed'

So Delilah cuts Samson’s hair and the Philistines gouge out his eyes. Captive, his hair grows back, his strength returns, he is summoned to the temple to provide amusement, and then the business with the pillars. How, specifically, does Samson, eyeless in Gaza, make his way to his appointment?

Parallel translations of Judges 16:26 in whole or in part:

“Samson told the young man” (GOD’S WORD ® Translation, 1995)

Allowing oneself to 'be the city'

A review of 'The City Real & Imagined'

erica kaufman

(Soma)tic Procedure: Every morning for six days read fifteen pages of The City Real & Imagined as a new and crucial part of your morning routine — whether this be a walking commute, a subway ride cross borough, a bus ride, etc.

The longing, in language, for a connection

A review of 'Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan'

Gail Scott

Any discussion of Jean Daive’s Under The Dome: Walks with Paul Celan must start with admiration for the work of the translator. For the French poet Daive’s chronicle of Paris walks with the great German-language poet Celan is a treatise on the question of translation, operating at precisely the point where translation meets poetry. That is, at the edge of the incommunicable. The allure of this odd chronicle has to do in part with an endlessly short-circuited intimacy during a half-decade of Paris walks — a failure that is clearly a trope for the difficulty of language to transmit over deep and definite gulfs. Each poet is conversant in the other’s language, indeed, translates the other. Yet so many of their conversations are riddled with ellipses, with gaps, with odd performative reaches, that the reader is endlessly aware of the tension between languages, between systems and ways of speaking.

We can't do it without the rose

A review of the film 'Under Foot & Overstory'

Rebekah Rutkoff

I’ve been captivated by the title of a Joseph Beuys lithograph since I saw it years ago. The image features the artist at his Documenta V desk in 1972, where for a hundred days he tirelessly debated radical politics with gallery visitors. An alert, focused Beuys anchors the bottom center; a section of the back of a head (his conversant) dominates the left foreground. On the tabletop separating them, a single long-stemmed rose reaches up into the blank top portion of the composition, slicing the image in half. We can’t do it without the rose.

A detour from more traditional paths of composition

A review of 'An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris'

Eugene Lim

The objective of a Baudelairian flâneur or Situationist psychogeographer might be described as the revelation of what’s hidden in plain sight. With their modern walkabouts, these conceptual strollers break free of the direct lines of commuter travel and instead happily wallow in an inefficient dawdle. A close cousin, the aspirations of constraint-based writing can be said to be the exploration of the “potential” literature created via similarly artificial detours from more traditional paths of composition.