Posts by: Daniel E Pritchard
To Revive the Lyric: Hoa Nguyen
From the technology of printing to the economy of grants and the politics of academia, literary culture exists in complete continuity with the rest of contemporary society. It is susceptible to the same virtues, biases, limitations,…
404: Identity Not Found
In March 2008, a month shy of his forty-fifth birthday, the critic and poet Reginald Shepherd was battling an aggressive form of colon cancer. The disease had already metastisized to…
In Which The Critical Flame Dedicates One Year to Women Writers and Writers of Color
Women writers and writers of color are underserved and undervalued by the contemporary literary community. The phenomenon has been well documented by critics such as Roxane Gay and Ruth Franklin, and by…
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…
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…
America, Goddam
I am an American male of northern European descent. Not terribly handsome, not particularly fit. Reasonably intelligent, unless I’m fooling myself. It’s certainly possible. I was raised in a predominantly…
A Letter from the Editor on Women in Literary Publishing
Recently [March 2011, –ed.], the literary cultural organization VIDA: Women in Literary Arts released a report on women in magazine publishing, focusing particularly on book reviews. The results of their…
The Lyric LangPo Alarm: Rae Armantrout
Rae Armantrout’s poetry is informed by two key sources: first, the radical poetics of 1960s San Francisco; second, the terse verse forms of William Carlos Williams, whose poetry she first…
In the Familiar Ways: Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path
“The reason the siren slides is because it doesn’t hit you,” said astronomer John Dobson. He was explaining the Doppler Effect, that phenomenon of physics every urban resident knows by…
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