Paragraph on Emily Dickinson Face to Face, ed. Anthony Madrid

In Publishers Weekly.

Here’s the whole ¶: Emily Dickinson springs to life in this remarkable, long-out-of-print biography written by her niece. The daughter of Dickinson’s older brother, Bianchi enchants immediately with anecdotes about being babysat by the poet on Sunday mornings when the rest of the household was in church. To the children, “Aunt Emily stood for indulgence,” secretly handing out sweets forbidden by stricter adults or eagerly “subscribing” when the children declared they were issuing their own newspaper. Bianchi shows that even as Dickinson withdrew physically from the wider world, she followed the shifting mores of the time, eagerly awaiting her adolescent niece’s reports about parties, clothes, and boys. While Bianchi reverentially describes her aunt’s observational genius (“a mystic inclusion in some higher beauty known only to herself”), she also wants readers to know Dickinson could be a bit of an art monster, whose friends weren’t afraid to call her on it. After one drove from out of town to visit her only to hear she was refusing “to come down from some whim,” he ignored the pretenses, calling up the stairs, “Emily, you rascal!—come down here!” She eventually did. Though millions of pages have been written about Dickinson, as poet Anthony Madrid notes in the book’s foreword, few have provided such a thrilling close-up portrait. Readers will be rapt from the first page.

[originally posted Monday 24 April 2023]

Two poems

In Sprung Formal.

Teaser quote:

—“Go die, Madrid! since you don’t know how to live.”

—Madrid says: “Fine, I’ll die.”

[originally posted Tuesday 9 May 2023]

Review of Jangar: The Heroic Epic of the Kalmyk Nomads, trans. by Saglar Bougdaeva

At Rhino.

Teaser quote: In the context of a review, quoting weak bits can’t help but come off like a cheap shot, because it really is true that every translation of any length is bound to have a few clunkers. But there’s bad and there’s fatal. I’m going to quote one stanza, full of unidiomatic awkward English, and containing certain lines that caused me to rub my eyes in disbelief…

[originally posted Monday 20 February 2023]

Review of Couplets: A Love Story, by Maggie Millner

At Rhino.

Teaser quote: From the Middle Ages up ’til WWI, rhyme was there to punctuate rhythm, and rhythm was considered essential. By 2023, art poetry has almost completely ceded rhythm and rhyme to popular music—where pleasure comes first, and acrobatics-for-the-sake-of-acrobatics comes last. Today, when you see rhyme in poetry, it’s almost always loveless: written by people who do not enjoy rhyming poetry, and who do not understand what those old cats were doing.

[originally posted Thursday 23 March 2023]

On Thomas May’s Translation of Lucan

At FENCE.

Teaser quote: John Aubrey says he heard that May, when drunk, used to mutter against the Trinity. But I do that, so…. Anyhow, what readers of this article want to know is: Do I really need to read this early-17th-century translation of Lucan, when I don’t even know my Ovid or my Virgil? And the answer to that is yes. You have to read everything on Dante’s list, and you have to read each of them in multiple translations. Whatever was the greatest translation in such-and-such century? That. You read that. And this right here—May’s Lucan—is clearly and undeniably the best English Lucan of the 17th century.

[originally posted Thursday 23 March 2023]

Review of Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi, by Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger

For Rhino.

Teaser quote: The thing I wanted to know up front was: Are the two translators lovers? Do they want to be? Is that what this is “really” about? Nothing in the blurbage, nor in the foreword, nor in the biographical notes gives you a clue. So, I did a Google image search. They are both beauties. He looks like Errol Flynn, and she looks like I don’t know who. Somebody’s dream girl. Huge eyes.

[originally posted Wednesday 18 January 2023]

Review of What Feelings Do When No One’s Looking

For Rhino.

Teaser quote:

—I like good pictures. Ones with dimension. They have to be very fun, but with a slight acridness that keeps you coming back.

—“Acridness”…?

[originally posted Wednesday 23 November 2022]

Review of the Vimalakirti Sutra

For Rhino.

Teaser quote: B.B.P. (Best Buddhist Practice) on this point is neatly expressed in a wise American maxim from the ’70s: “COLLECT ’EM ALL.”

[originally posted Monday 17 October 2022]

One poem by me

At Columba.

Teaser quote: “…in whales that are only box kites…”

[originally posted Wednesday 3 August 2022]

Two poems by me

At Blackbox Manifold (UK).

Teaser quote:


Bag of black beans. Malfeasance and fraud.
I’m not into anger, I’ve taken a vow.
I get very angry, I’m angry right now,
but that’s different from being into it.

[originally posted Friday 29 July 2022]