Arts

The Discarded

Fieldnotes: Annie Christain’s “The Vanguards of Holography” and Caroline Harper New’s “A History of Half-Birds”

“There is a sense of preparation through formal and informal erudition, meant to complicate what it means to write adequately about natural and human worlds, with fewer donnéees and more of a sense of a non-human cosmos, one of manatees and marsupials, in which each creature’s essence is not given t

Strawberry Fields Forever: Amie Whittemore’s “Nest of Matches”

“Lilies/finch/flinches/nest/basil/hair/hat. I would swear before a jury that those are all legitimate off-rhymes, even if I were convicted of perjury for it. I wish that Shelley or Keats or Lorca or Miguel Hernández were alive so that I could pass this poem along to them.”

Cosmic Comic Kvetching in Anthony Immergluck’s “The Worried Well”

“The grand Guignol exaggeration provides an excellent comic read, as we fail to take completely seriously his worrywart grandstanding. Chances are, we have known someone exactly like him, who upon greeting us, got straight to describing their various medical conditions, real and imagined in excrucia

Midwestern Mice in Silk Kimonos: Yuki Tanaka’s “Chronicle of Drifting”

“[Yuki] Tanaka’s singular view, somewhat detached yet not lacking in compassion, soberly reckoning while allowing for flights of optimism, is, again, the product of the angle of vision of the flaneur, the stranger in town, the person who has seen it all but decides not to linger on individual premis

Language for Throat and Tongue: Elise Paschen’s “Blood Wolf Moon”

“[Elise] Paschen’s writing give new meaning to the term ‘ethnopoetics,’ taking it outside the boundaries of ‘traditional societies,’ ‘the informant,’ and the outsider who goes in to record ‘pre-literate narratives.’”

The Speech of Herbs: Melissa Kwasny’s “The Cloud Path”

“Yet what might in lesser hands become mere effusions is tempered with a wise, sometimes steely, sometimes self-abnegating, sometimes mournful contemplative voice that speaks of philosophical and personal concerns combined…”

Villa 351

“The news we got at first was dire,/the damage bad though not entire”

Still in the Holler

“If a stranger comes around, if he’s wise, he will keep to the road and announce his business soon, clearly and loudly, then you’ll see what’s what. You’re not against him, but you’re not automatically for him.”

The Buster’s Hand: Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s “Rodeo”

“In her exquisitely physical Rodeo, Sunni Brown Wilkinson takes her place among those superb modernists, early and late and post, who recognize the combination of mutability and continuity across poetic epochs that is a key to lyric’s continuing strength and relevance…”

God’s in the Weeds: Daneen Bergland’s “The Goodbye Kit”

“Eve about to be cast out of the Garden kills as the mistress of straight-faced understatement. There is no fury, no rebuke, or if there is, it has not set in yet. Instead, we get rationalizing, looking on the bright side, and philosophical self-doubt.”

Sand, Ash, or Mud: Valerie Witte’s “A Rupture in the Interiors”

“As for most poets, [Valerie] Witte’s writing is intensely personal, whatever form it may take. No ‘experimental’ poet could be more candid and direct about her intention of ‘examining in a new way’ matters close to her heart.”

Little Engines of Self: Joy Manesiotis’ “Revoke”

“It is a remarkable feat of poetics to create epic sense out of the most micro of human materials.”

Notes on Kitsch: Janice Harrington’s “Yard Show”

“As witness of this exaltation of the gaudy, the poet reclaims kitsch as a redemptive force, a vital stream of art, when it is mindfully connected to a set of local traditions, the heritage of a group that had to strive hard to find its native expression using the materials at hand.”

How to Read Poetry

“If I have become something of an expert reader of poems, it is in part because long ago, I learned to linger on the surface of things, rather than push past their specifics in order to arrive quickly at instant profundity.”

The Dead Are Difficult: Jenny George’s “After Image”

“The tone of After Image is simultaneously calm and feverish, as the bereaved one moves along a spectrum from numb to utterly passionate, up and down, yet never hysterical, never heaping ashes on her head.”

Wrackable as Arguments: Anne-Marie Turza’s “Fugue with Bedbug”

“[Anne-Marie] Turza shows dramatic flair for summoning our attention, that of a town crier or carnival barker who was handed a surprise announcement at the last possible minute, and now must sell its premise before a skeptical gathered audience with all the bravado she can muster.”

“No One Is Ever Really Just One Thing”: Laurel Nakanishi’s “Ashore”

“What stands out in Nakanishi is that she possesses an acute awareness of the root poetic traditions of her native islands and brings them forward with respect while also being influenced, as she herself professes, by poets such as Californian Gary Snyder—whose verse, like hers, is thoroughly immers

Scribe in Disguise: Amy Beeder’s “And So Wax Was Made and Also Honey”

“[Amy] Beeder’s nimble adaptiveness and ability to key her lexicon to a wily set of speakers and dramatic personae in And So Wax Was Made and Also Honey are what make this rare book command attention.”

Fierce Lyric in Karla Kelsey’s “Blood Feather”

“Blood Feather stages scenes of both unexpected victory and chronic defeat in the three featured lives, while allowing us to imagine an alternative history for these women, had they been listened to and given latitude to exercise their rightful prerogatives in the culture at large, rather than retre

Ekphrasis and Eugene Datta’s “Water and Wave”

“Once the speaker’s psyche and voice are introduced via questions, the photo in a sense begins to dissolve, becoming secondary, important, vital in its own right, but not ultimately defining. Thus the fecund faithlessness of poetry.”

How To Write Lyric Poetry

“This lyre-derived heritage survives robustly in the lyrics of pop songs, guitars now taking the place of the lyre and the orality of the human voice singing taking precedence over all.”

A Different Kind of Knowledge: Matthew Zapruder’s “I Love Hearing Your Dreams”

“The combination of dread and cheer these reveries bring about could accurately be called the optimist’s nightmare. The poet-speaker holds compassion as the stalk of a dandelion holds juice, hidden yet keeping the flower active and aloft through sheer tensile strength.”

Poems Without a Passport: Solmaz Sharif’s “Customs”

“Sharif’s style throughout Customs is neither bland nor baroque. It has the directness of what one overhears while waiting in line to cross on foot an international border or passing through immigration at an airport. It is a stylization of how people talk in such circumstances.”

Syllabic Fits of Speech: Cedar Sigos’ “All This Time”

“Sigo is a poet of utter seriousness, one who feels strongly about justice, the revindication of Native American identity, the calling out of cruelty and neglect, and many other pressing social matters. But he comes at the task with a meditative indirection, insisting on approaching these realities

A Fresh Look at André Spears’ “From the Lost Land I-XII”

“And it is all held together in an irrepressible delight in language and what happens when language and imagination are unleashed and told to have a good time.”

Lynn Xu’s Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight

“Here reposes the reverie-inducing freedom of Rilke and Proust, where you get to say ‘dreaming’ twice, or a thousand times, and even ‘et cetera’ twice, in case you forgot to fill in the blank with your own lyrical, rapture-adjacent images the first time.”

Kink or Worship or Both: Megan Fernandes’ “I Do Everything I’m Told”

“In invoking (and sometimes tweaking) cherished predecessors, this gently impious collection also helps refurbish form.”

For Whom the Nobel Tolls: Tomas Tranströmer’s “The Blue House”

“The lines, like long, rolling ocean waves on a cold Baltic sea, create their own reasons, their own rhythm, their own understanding. Anaphora is used, as Whitman did, to summon us to the great historical pageant of life, of happenings beyond our immediate knowledge.”

The Creases Between Utterances: Jenny Xie’s “The Rupture Tense”

“Whether [Jenny] Xie’s volume was long in the making or came out in a fiery burst (maybe both, by parts?), it is a work of substance, worthy of its current high reputation.”

Edgar Kunz’s “Tap Out” and “Fixer”

“Edgar Kunz, the author of Tap Out and Fixer, does not refer to himself specifically as blue collar, proletarian, or working class. Well-meaning others, such as mentor Edward Hirsch, do so, referring to Tap Out as ‘gutsy, tough-minded, working-class poems of memory and initiation.’”

On Arthur Sze’s “The Silk Dragon II”

“Whatever one may say about the People’s Republic of China today, it once offered the model of the poet-emperor, as well as poets employed in political life, wedding governance to lyric spirit.”

Bianca Stone, What Is Otherwise Infinite

“By that token, perhaps Bianca Stone is just the poet for our times. Her verses wrestle with a dirty angel, one that bites and kicks. There is no snow-white falcon in her pages. But she does not quit.”

Lisa Olstein’s Dream Apartment

“The Dream Apartment is no Barbie’s Dream House. It is rather an abode of opaque and backlit, sometimes hard-edged reverie.”

How KFC Gives Prisoners a Taste of Normal Life

“I said a silent prayer, asking for the strength to get through another day of being incarcerated, and climbed down from my steel bunk, ready to navigate the gossip, fighting, and ordinary drama that come with prison life.”

Coming to Terms with a Lifetime of Trauma While in Prison

“The hyper-masculine environment of a prison creates additional impediments. Inmates fear that any sign of weakness might lead another inmate to take advantage, another reason not to speak openly with others. Sexual abuse is at the top of the list of things prisoners will not talk about.”

You Tread on My Dreams

“Allow me to be unambiguous: I am no one’s BIPOC mannequin. I am a person foremost and not a skin color, and I will not be cheapened nor reduced. I am not marginalized, and I need no special treatment. I refuse your categories.”

Excerpt: “Red Hands”

“It had taken an earthquake for me to see Ceausescu greed as it really was, and I knew how bad these excesses would look to my countrymen.”

From Town Bloody Hall to 2023: A Tale of Two Debates on Women’s Liberation

“Avoiding these truly current, red hot issues, the women speak past each other.”

With Action, Gran Turismo Crosses the Finish Line. With Drama, Not So Much

“On the basis of viscerality alone, Gran Turismo is worth the price of admission for the two-hour cruise along.”

Un Carro Triste: A Melancholic Car

“We must take the language/by surprise;/seal its every utterance/with a kiss or tear…”

Mark Goldblatt and the Art of Persuasion

“I cannot argue with his characterization of Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes as a ‘triumvirate of stooges,’ but with me, he is preaching to the choir. How will he convince the postmodernists?”

Doing the Woke

“The more these women agreed to be shamed for their ‘whiteness,’ the more I wondered why doing so made them feel ethical. Feeling shame makes nobody ethical. Just uncomfortable.”

On Wimbledon Champion Vic Seixas Reaching the Century Mark

“As he reaches the century mark, Elias Victor Seixas Jr. deserves our respect and gratitude for leading a long and extraordinary life.”

Letter to the Editor: In Defense of Rereading

“If reading is about a relationship with a text, then my subsequent readings represented different relationships. As I changed, the book changed. I was a different person reading a different book. I am not even sure it is accurate to call this rereading.”

Should You Read the Same Book Twice?

“Amid this exchange about the importance of recentering the essential literature of our history, I posed to Mac Donald a question that has been on my mind since my days as a student at The Haverford School: Should one make a habit of reading the same book twice?”

A Once Unnecessary Reminder: Criticism Produces Good Works

“My own song ‘Alabama’ richly deserved the shot Lynyrd Skynyrd gave me with their great record. I don’t like my words when I listen to it. They are accusatory and condescending…”

Abortion and the Mythic Mother

“They do not realize good mothering comes from fearlessness. Few things promote more fear than being deprived of control of one’s own body.”

Fetterman v. Oz (And a Love Letter to a Conflicted Pennsylvania)

“Not everything stays the same, and, in many cases, it probably should not.”

George Psalmanazar and the Extreme Art of Imposture

“Many of us also like impostors because, deep down, we understand that to exist only matter-of-factly, without fiction, would be intolerable.”

Review: James I. Porter’s “Homer: The Very Idea”

“But the price of that fame and quasi-divine status took its toll. ‘Immortality had its costs,’ Porter writes, ‘and Homer paid for it dearly.’”

Moving Clockwise around Easton County

“They’ve always been rivals with a town across the county line, a town of insulation and roofing makers. It’s a working-class rivalry, the authentic kind, one that lasts whatever color the collars become.”

Review: Philip Freeman’s “Hannibal”

“Freeman’s book, as the author acknowledges, is written as something of a eulogy to this great man of antiquity, who has captured imaginations for two millennia.”

Review: Eden Collinsworth’s “What the Ermine Saw”

“Almost all the key events of modern Europe were seen through the eyes of this painting, which Collinsworth vividly brings to life in her writing.”

Review: Riley Black’s “The Last Days of the Dinosaurs”

“This is a story about the meek inheriting the Earth.”

Review: “Saving Yellowstone” by Megan Kate Nelson

“Much like the United States itself, the story of Yellowstone is one of tragedy and hope, defiance and cut-throat ambition, beauty and terror, charity and callousness.”

“Father Stu”: A Story of Hardship and Redemption

“One of the spiritual overtones present in Father Stu is one important to Christian teaching: the merit of suffering. The Christ-like endurance of suffering is particularly embodied in Long himself.”

The Irresistible Passion of Peter Paul Rubens

“Rubens is my favorite artist, in part, because his paintings capture the totality of the human condition in its fleshy, pathological, and metaphysical realities.”

Review: Bruce Clark’s “Athens: City of Wisdom”

“Athens: City of Wisdom is a tour through over 3,000 years of the history of a city that has such imaginative sway and spiritual power over the hearts and minds of so many people around the world today.”

Fifty Years of “The Godfather”

It has been 50 years since The Godfather was widely released in the United States on March 24, 1972.

Review: Roosevelt Montás’s “Rescuing Socrates”

“In this rousing story, [Roosevelt] Montás concentrates on four particular ‘great authors’ that embody and encapsulate the human condition who shaped him: Saint Augustine, Plato, Sigmund Freud, and Mohandas Gandhi.”

Dante’s Divine Valentine

“Love is the central theme of Dante’s Vita Nuova and Divine Comedy. It is from love that new life begins. It is in love that life is sustained and made pleasant.”

Review: Arnold Weinstein’s “The Lives of Literature”

“His culminating chapter is a love letter from his heart of his life spent in literature, his life as it matured for himself, and he has given himself and his favorite books to us to discover afresh and anew.”

Equinox

“Yet the cold does not rest there.”

The Relevance of Tolkien’s Unfinished Work “The New Shadow”

“However, in his uncompleted sequel to The Lord of the Rings, The New Shadow, as well as The Silmarillion, Tolkien presented a different vision of human nature, one that is more realistic and more concomitant with his Catholic upbringing.”

Is Ovid Still Worth Reading?

“Such politicized readings of the last 50 years miss the profundity of Ovid’s inclusion of the story in his grander poetic agenda of love being the constant star in the midst of a world of violence and transformation.”

America “Un-tied”

“But the one fight that never resolved was the one between my Bessarabian grandfather and my American Uncle Izzie, who drove a truck and married into the family long before I was born. And it happened during the late 1970s, during the Carter administration.”

Toward a Politics of Reconciliation: John Sayles’s “Lone Star,” after 25 Years

“Sayles’s 1996 film, Lone Star, is arguably his greatest work to date. And after 25 years, given the tensions that continue to circle around issues of race and immigration, it certainly has not lost any of its original force and relevance.”

On the Eve of His Comeback, James Bond Resonates for a Reason

“Young Americans, myself included, need to resist the impulses of the day and keep striving. We may never be Bond types, but the quest for self-improvement is the point. To strive is to live.”

Flyover Blues: The Enduring Relevance of F. Scott Fitzgerald 

“One hundred years after Fitzgerald’s great novels, we are living in the same world as Nick Carraway, Amory Blaine, and Jay Gatsby.”

she asked me to get her a green card

“Although I would have liked to have taken a photograph, my camera was full, and they’d already walked away toward a shop with a sign advertising Calzones.”

Review: Louis Menand’s “The Free World”

“In many ways, the book also reads as a eulogy to a liberal, liberalizing, and internationalist America.”

The Two-faces of Classical Music: Criticism Good, Bad, and Ugly

“Why, after all, should it be ‘pro-test,’ and not ‘de-test’? Protest once meant to give testimony in pro of something good, over and against something corrupt.”

Sir Roger Scruton’s Wagner

“Scruton loved Wagner. The two were a match made in heaven, or hell, depending on your perspective and appreciation of irony.”

What “Star Wars” Taught Me about War, Liberty, and Human Nature

“For a young immigrant boy who knew nothing about politics or history, Star Wars had a universal appeal that transcended language, nationality, time, and other superficial social barriers.”

Open Carry in the Time of the Pandemic

“Channeling Uncle Bill, who died over a decade ago, I invite his ghost to weigh in. But rather than answering, he walks me downstairs in his old Brooklyn house, where we stand together in his paneled den—the perfect skin we’d heard about, now on the floor.”

Virgil’s War and Peace

“Two millennia later, we are still warring over the meaning of Virgil’s Aeneid.”

Odysseus: the First Western Man

“Odysseus is the first recognizably Western man.”

In Every Time and Every Place: the Political Nuance of “Legend of Galactic Heroes”

“This is not a clear-cut struggle between good and evil, especially when enemies could come from within as well as without. Rather…it is a war between one good and another.”

Buried Treasure

“Dad never searched for buried treasure again. He instead bought lottery tickets, entered contests online, and invested in a million dinar after Iraq fell…”

How “Ms .45” and Zoë Lund Paved Abel Ferrara’s Way

“In the end, these are movies about redemption and what it means to be redeemed, whatever the struggle in getting there.”

When We’ve Stopped Reading

“By sheer accident, one man in this stupefied future learns how to read.”

Review: Michael Shnayerson’s “Bugsy Siegel”

“It is a short and gripping panorama of life in 1920s-1940s America, that defining epoch of struggle and stardom, hardship and grandeur, fortune and bankruptcy—and Bugsy Siegel experienced it all.”

Third Wave

“The statistics were/like our scores—and we wanted/to lead the boards…”

Dawn in Pennsylvania

“How to describe it all? My dad and his sweaty armpits and the black garbage bags with the slice of old-time America buried inside. This sadness I’ve become filled with, which doesn’t feel like the kind of sadness the artist intended, but the opposite…his sadness looks like happiness to me.”

Why James Bond Is a Positive Role Model for Young Americans

“In the meantime, fans have discussed and debated the merits of Bond himself. Is the character a good person? Is he a positive role model for today’s youth?”

Review: Jan Swafford’s “Mozart: The Reign of Love”

“The problem is that this story of Mozart that we think we know is not true at all; thankfully, Jan Swafford is here to correct the problem.”

Review: “The Klondike Bake-Oven Deaths”

“In a novel to be released later this month, Hornblum—perhaps best known for his 1998 non-fiction book Acres of Skin, which centers on different events at Holmesburg Prison—retells the calamitous events of August, 1938.”

What Ortega y Gasset and Orwell Both Foresaw

“Both Ortega and Orwell concluded that the Left was in trouble as a result of these developments, and their analyses and diagnoses pointed the way forward to the situation we have today in the West.”

The Moral Philosophy of Plutarch

“While not all of his essays are explicitly moral in orientation, nearly all of Plutarch’s essays have moral instruction and guidance baked into them.”

What Latvia Understands That America Doesn’t

“Having lived in Latvia for over a year…there is a selection of good things, ideas or their manifestations, which seem to pervade Latvia and/or which the United States either lacks or has forgotten.”

My Experience Being Cancelled, Twice

“While many have suffered badly—and I do feel their anguish over being fired, falling into depression, or even committing suicide—I have to admit that it turned out rather nicely for me.”

Review: Nicholas McDowell’s “Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton”

“As McDowell suggests, it was the liberating and open environment of humanist education that moved Milton more than any theological or political zeal, and it seized Milton at an early age.”

Don’t Cancel the Classics—We Need Them More Than Ever

“Those who are adamant that love will trump hate, heal the world, and divinize us are not articulating anything new. The Greeks are still singing to us the songs of humanistic love as the spirit that will heal the world.”

General Patton’s Silent Night

“On December 21, 1945—75 years ago today—in the stillness of his waning moments in a German military hospital, General George S. Patton Jr. pondered his life.”

Beware the Interpreter: “Hillbilly Elegy” as a Prime Example

“Vance’s critics could benefit from a basic overview of the difference between a primary and secondary source, and between the personal and the systemic.”

Ten Novels for Understanding the Modern British Identity

“Therefore, in the spirit of diversity and exploration, I have compiled a list of what I see as the ten best novels on modern British identity, to remind us that British identity is not exhausted by the referendum divides…”

Review: Clint Margrave’s “Lying Bastard”

“Lying Bastard is a work of the zeitgeist. Disgruntled intellectuals. Returning war veterans just beginning their higher education. A school shooting. The fraud of academicians. Societal exploitation.”

A Korean Dyad

“Saying that people need to know the objective truth about what goes on Up There, the objective truth about evil places fueled by imported wine and blank consciences.”

Self-Determination and Philip K. Dick’s “Ubik”

“The ultimate message it proffers—Ubik the substance, Ubik the book—is one of self-determination despite humanity’s manifest lack of control and certainty.”

“Gone with the Wind” Isn’t Going Anywhere

“What is a classic? What is an epic? These two questions loom over any reader of Gone with the Wind (and great literature, more generally).”

The Oedipus Complex of a Nation in Flux

“Reading it specifically in the context of the current societal struggles and apparently widespread cultural conflicts occurring in the United States today, the myth imbues the reader with a redoubled vigilance.”

[Give the Man a Name]

“On fences and poles were the signs and posters of the age. Men with hard eyes and stiff lips; men with mustaches and military hats; women in dresses, sleeves rolled, forearms flexed. The age the man knew not.”

What “The Merchant of Venice” Has to Say about Justice

“Just as it was in Shakespeare’s time, the questions of justice, mercy, and society remain as relevant as ever before, and we have much to learn from the great bard of Anglodom.”

Achilles, Priam, and the Redemptive Power of Forgiveness

“For all the battle scenes, violent sex, and rage that fills the poem, the most memorable scenes in the poem are moments of love—especially loving moments of embrace.”

Maurizio Cattelan and When Art “Ridicules Art Itself”

“This is an art which no longer presumes to speak to or for the general public. Such an art “assails all previous art” and even “ridicules art itself.”

Can We Read Moby Dick?

“But, as I found myself stumbling in my response to my sister, a more elemental question arose: Can we read Moby Dick?”

Aeschylus’ “Prometheus Bound”: Where Is Meaning to be Found?

“Aeschylus’ tragedy represents the most elemental aspects of our human condition: all human flourishing comes with a cost.”

Aristophanes: The First Poet Critic

In the words of German poet Henrich Heine: “There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.”

Why Aeschylus Still Matters Today

“But Aeschylus’ cosmos goes beyond Homer’s in presenting Reason, Persuasion, as an integral aspect of the cosmos that was otherwise absent in Homer.”

Poetry and Modernity

“Any civilization or culture is itself a vast dynamic interpretation or, we could even say, a vast dynamic work of art.”