Neo-Confessionalism:
Whose Commodity Am I, Anyway?
“We danced until we became markets.” —Bhanu Kapil Owning one’s intellectual property, one’s body, and one’s subjectivity may seem like a triumvirate fait accompli for contemporary women writers. Western women in…
Protest, but Not Too Much:
Anne Champion’s Reluctant Mistress
The poems of Anne Champion’s debut collection, Reluctant Mistress, obsessively pick at the physical and emotional aspects of sexual relationships—often unhappily. The title is inspired by Cassandra, the beautiful woman…
Antic Panoply: The New Arcana
In The Art of Recklessness, Dean Young brings New York School surrealism into new relief. He talks of a poetry that contains the kind of stage-spanning acrobatic leaps you might…
Dazzling and Tremendous
“. . .we must understand [madness] not as reason diseased, or as reason lost or alienated, but quite simply as reason dazzled.” —Michel Foucault Insanity and poetry are old kin. The…
Another Zone of Consciousness
“At times I have the feeling that I am writing about three or four different men, each one distinct, each one a contradiction of all the others. Fragments. Or the…
The Particulars of Grief
Reading Rusty Morrison’s After Urgency is like experiencing the unsettling calm after a storm: the sky has turned a disarming shade of blue; the ocean, which took everything, looks deceptively innocent. Wasn’t me….
Why Are There Two Reviews of Wiman’s Mandelstam?
That’s an excellent question. This isn’t the first time that we’ve covered a title more than once — Ben Mazer’s Poems has made several appearances, as we’ve become a sort…
Wiman’s Mandelstam (and Mine)
One evening about thirty five years ago, I was browsing the poetry shelves of College Hill Bookstore, in Providence, and picked up the Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, translated by…
Stolen Air, Broken Voice
Osip Emilevich Mandelstam was born in Warsaw, a European Jew, in 1891. A subject of the Russian empire, his family was granted the right to move to St. Petersburg when…
Getting Off and Getting Even
Vagina. It announces itself, a magnum opus on female sexuality. We start, ironically, with the ending. Naomi Wolf’s orgasms, once reliable, have mysteriously gone astray. The cause? A late diagnosis…