Posts by: Liza Katz

A Mother’s Jealousy, A Mother’s Love

May, 2015 | by

Laura van Prooyen’s new collection Our House Was on Fire reads like a fairy tale. Like so many fairy tales, the poems relate a difficult mother-daughter relationship, in which the…

The Impassive Listener: Rusty Morrison

Jul, 2014 | by

A chainlink is an apt image for the way concepts and objects become a single edifice, the way objects and meaning create boundary and enclosure, the way perception becomes partition…

Musica Ex Machinae

Mar, 2014 | by

An incidental byproduct of machinery, music muttered under the breath, the sound of human voices and the human heart: Hum, the title of Jamaal May’s debut poetry collection, is also…

The Storm before the Storm: Jane Miller’s Thunderbird

Sep, 2013 | by

In her written work as well as her commentary, Jane Miller regards the past as a truth that demands to be told. Her view echoes, in some respects, Faulkner’s famous…

The Particulars of Grief

Jan, 2013 | by

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….

Skin-Deep: Raymond Roussel’s New Impressions of Africa

Jul, 2011 | by

Let me begin with a story from my own experience, one that came to mind when I read Raymond Roussel’s New Impressions of Africa. A group of young poets, mostly…

Writing the Cry: French and Francophone Literature

Mar, 2011 | by

Is France still at the center of the French-language literary world? Or, to ask a broader question, is there a center at all? In the fall of 2006, five of…