THE CRITICAL FLAME :: Issue 5, January 2010

:: Volume 1, Issue 5 | January — February 2010 ::

on verse

Daniel E. Pritchard reviews John Ashbery's Planisphere

“The planisphere addresses the stars in a way that was once crucial to success, to survival; now, it is not only the un-modern device of the chart, but the very reading of stars that is outmoded and expendable. The world acts in ways unimaginable to those ancient sailors. It is the very relationship of the address that has been lost. It may be just that sentiment which Ashbery wishes to explore in Planisphere.”

Ailbhe Darcy reviews the verse of Daniel Simko

“In all of the many examples of ekphrasis — poems after artistic or literary works by Kathe Kollwitz, Balthus, Gunter Eich, Sandoor Csoori, Lori Reidel, as well as a poem after a photograph ‘almost taken’ — none makes it possible for the reader to easily look up a specific art piece on Google Images and compare it with its poem: the natural desire to judge the ‘success’ of an ekphrastic poem in this way, by mimetic standards, is thwarted.”

on fiction

Nora Delaney reviews The Anthologist

“Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist is a strange book: part idiosyncratic poetry manual, part disconnected personal narrative. The first line of the novel, if you can comfortably call it that, pulls no punches: ‘Hello, this is Paul Chowder, and I’m going to try to tell you everything I know.’ The reader is thrust involuntarily into a relationship with the infuriating, disarming Chowder for almost 250 pages as he moons over his breakup with Roz — stringer-of-beads and washer-of-dogs-extraordinaire — as well as his inability to write an introduction to a poetry anthology — this latter failure having precipitated Roz’s leaving.”

Matthew Jakubowski reviews Poisonville

“In Hammett's novels, people are basically either worthless scum or flawed heroes. Not so in Poisonville. No character is heroic. There is none of that mordant wit; there is no code of honor, no master detective as in Carlotto's “Alligator” detective series. There's no evil kingpin — just conglomerates and bureaucrats. The world of The Godfather is nowhere to be found: here, ‘change’ and time are the villains: “For years, criminal cultures from Eastern Europe and the third world had established a local presence; in fact, Italian organized crime was only a fond memory of aging police-beat reporters’.”

George Fragopoulos on the novels of Margarita Karapanou

“There is a tireless peripatetic thrust in Karapanou’s novels. They only refrain from becoming essayistic by her use of fragmentary, non-linear narratives. Protagonists and readers alike are never still in her books, never at ease. When reading Karapanou, one is reminded of Pascal's famous aphorism that evil and suffering arise from the simple reason that man cannot remain peacefully at rest within a room.”

Letters to the Editor

Misspellings? Incorrect dates? Wrongly attributed works? Missing piece of information? Praise? Disagreement?
Send a letter to the editor, at info@criticalflame.org.

Call for Submissions

The Critical Flame is now accepting book review and critical essay submissions on fiction, verse, and non-fiction titles. There are no explicit length requirements or limits, we only ask that essays be a reasonable length for their topic and that an article’s length never exceed its coherence. We have no requirements or quotas for positive or negative reviews, but essays that acknowledge both the flaws and virtues existent in all titles will be given preference over essays whose content are merely laudatory or simply vitriol. Although we seek learned and well-researched essays, please remember that The Critical Flame is not an academic publication and the audience for us, always, is the intelligent reading public.

There seems to be a gap in our culture between the academic and public mind, a certain incongruity of expectation and focus, a certain disdain each for the other. This disjunction is not an impasse, but a challenge to our imaginations, and one we gladly take up; and we hope you'll undertake this project with us.

If you have an idea for a review or essay, but are unsure whether it is appropriate for The Critical Flame, the editors welcome you to send us an email query. We are also happy to contact publishers on behalf of our reviewers. We look forward to hearing from you.

The Editors