Review of William Fuller’s Daybreak

At Rhino.

Teaser quote: The stories you’ve heard are true. He was (and maybe in some sense still is) Chief Fiduciary Officer at Northern Trust in Chicago. What that means I don’t know. My fantasy is it means he sits at a desk the size of a ship, and snatches up a phone with no buttons on it. He says in a calm voice: “Tell Peter and Josh to come in here right away.” Before he puts the phone down, Peter and Josh are comin’ through that door, both of ’em talking at once. CUT TO Fuller’s face: no reaction.

[originally posted Monday 8 June 2020]

Poem by me: “Nineteen Gnomic Stanzas”

On NONSITE.

Teaser quote: 

A bison will savor a dust wallow.
His motto is “Anything goes.”
Have a look at the ants in the closet 
eating your clothes.

[originally posted Sunday 24 May 2020]

Thing by Colin Pope ’bout my first book, at Nimrod

At Nimrod.

Teaser quote: To me, these lines read as the type of conversation one has in the bathroom mirror when seeking to separate the hedonistic impulse from the rational, as in those moments when we are about to do something entirely stupid and irresponsible but, knowing our nature, will probably do it anyway.

[originally posted Wednesday 22 April 2020]

Review of Kirsten Ihns’s Sundaey

At Rhino.

Teaser quote: You know who’s good? Kirsten Ihns. Her first book just came out: Sundaey. You don’t wanna miss this one. You only see this kind of freshness and spontaneity five, six times a decade. And it might be the kind of thing that even Ihns can only pull off once . . .

[originally posted Saturday 9 May 2020]

Review of Red Pine’s translation of Liu Zongyuan

At Rhino.

Teaser quote: Why anyone is still using the Wade-Giles system of transliteration of Chinese into English I cannot fathom. Wade-Giles is a counterintuitive, cumbersome system that should never have been deployed in the public sphere. It has caused English speakers to mispronounce 1.4 billion Chinese words.

[originally posted Saturday 9 May 2020]

Review of Mark Bibbins’s Thirteenth Balloon

At Rhino.

Teaser quote: In every single poem, the poet aims for an effect, and then works a bunch of verbal magic to secure that effect. There are forty-seven poems; ’bout forty of ’em are right over the plate. I don’t have to tell ya: that proportion is epic. It’s better than you’d get out of, say, an anthology of classics. I’m especially stimulated by this, because Bibbins is almost exactly my age, and I regard our generation as being particularly incompetent at this sort of thing.…

[originally posted Tuesday 14 April 2020]

Review of Rumi: Poems from the Divan-e Shams, edited and translated by Geoffrey Squires

At Rhino.

Teaser quote: The guy can write; I’m not saying he can’t. But he has this unshakable habit of setting up his translations from Persian the way rock lyrics are printed: no punctuation, and as few capital letters as possible. (His preferred piece of punctuation is the middle-of-the-line white space, like in Beowulf.) The upshot is just what you’d expect: The poems become harder to understand, and their strophic structure is made damnably obscure. Not indiscernible; obscure. You literally sit there wishing you had a .docx of the thing, so you could redact the most promising pieces, restoring them to their original shapes.

[originally posted Tuesday 14 April 2020]

“And Alexander wept…”

At The Paris Review Online.

Teaser quote:

All right, this particular canard has had all its feathers pulled off many times. I claim no originality. People explain it over and over on blogs. Every twenty seconds, somebody asks about it, and the Explainers go to work. The “quote” goes like this:

And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer.

“Alexander” is, of course, Alexander the Great, king of Macedon in the 4th century BC. A legend in his own time, etc, he died in his early thirties, etc, having won many battles. The quote is poetic. It touches a theme dear to everyone’s heart: the Tears of the Monster. However! from time to time, some bright person is forced by the laws of physics to ask: “In what ancient text does that passage appear?” Answer: It appears nowhere.

[originally posted Thursday 19 March 2020]

Review of That Summer by Inger Hagerup, translated by Becky Lynn Crook 

At Rhino.

Teaser quote: Anyhow, once again I’ll say: The only thing really wrong with this translation is it doesn’t include the originals. But if somehow you can get a hold of ’em, I can tell you from experience: A wonderful morning awaits the person who sets the Norwegian and English versions side by side. The cognates alone are so ridiculously fun: {epletreet | apple tree}, {Liten? Jeg? Langtifra. | Little? Me? Far from it.} {hulter til bulter | helter-skelter}, and so on.

[originally posted Wednesday 4 March 2020]

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Review of Remarkable Trees, by Christina Harrison and Tony Kirkham 

At Rhino.

Teaser quote: A parable. I used to ask my students in Tucson how many butterflies they thought they saw in a week. Of course, they guessed “one or two at most.” I was like, “Yeah, you see twenty-five every day—’cept you don’t see ’em ’cuz you can’t tell ’em apart. You don’t know when to be surprised, you don’t know when to get excited….” Here is a deep truth: nineteen times out of twenty, you can only see something if you know what it’s called.

[originally posted Wednesday 4 March 2020]

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The Other Billy Collins

At The Paris Review Online.

Teaser quote: When Sir Egerton Brydges read that for the first time, as a young man, he shat the bed with rage. Fifty years later he was still so mad he wrote an essay (thirty-one pages in the copy I have), basically saying Johnson had no soul, no feelings, and that Collins compares favorably to virtually every other poet who ever lived, including Aeschylus and Euripides. I’m exaggerating only slightly. The critic really does come off unhinged, reminding me of Walter Bronson’s comment (1898), excusing the ecstasy of one of Collins’s early reviewers: “If this is not criticism, at least it is rapture.”

[originally posted Wednesday 29 January 2020]

Review of Little Parsley, by Inger Hagerup, translated by Becky Lynn Crook

At Rhino.

Teaser quote: In the space I have to work with here, I can only pass around a handful of specimens along with their originals. It’ll show that the translator is a skilled operator, eyes on the prize. However, it’s also liable to give you an insatiable desire for Hagerup’s originals. (Insatiable, unless you’re prepared to brave the wilds of Norwegian cyberspace.)

[originally posted Saturday 8 February 2020]

Review of The Shrine Whose Shape I Am: The Collected Poetry of Samuel Menashe

At Rhino.


Teaser quote: Here’s a strange case: Samuel Menashe. A kind of public weirdo for fifty years, very bumptious, showing up to lectures in Manhattan and asking rude questions, republishing the same hundred poems over and over, each one the size of a postage stamp.… Most people answering this description have no merit and cannot write poetry. Menashe, somehow, could.

[originally posted Saturday 8 February 2020]

Excellent if You Were a Village

At The Paris Review Online.

Teaser quote: She discovered something. There’s a small set of operating principles that, if followed, result in aphorisms, stanzas, lectures, novels. Anything you like. The author does not have to have a meaning in view; the work will mean something by itself.

[originally posted Wednesday 8 January 2020]

Review of The Complete and Original Norwegian Folktales of Asbjørnsen and Moe

At Rhino.

Teaser quote: The structure of these narratives was geared towards killing time. This factor is not always understood. Look at bedtime stories. The kiddies don’t care at all about the content; they just want you to stay with them. They want to have the sensation of being serviced. The only reason they need the stories to be intelligible at all is ’cuz it’s fatiguing to have to listen to something you don’t understand.

[originally posted Saturday 7 December 2019]