Chameleon Poet: The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, by Gillian Cummings
In selecting her manuscript for the 2018 Colorado Prize forPoetry, John Yau praises Gillian Cummings using a phrase from Keats, calling her a “cameleon Poet.” Cummings has written two prize-winning…
Conversations: Femi Osofisan and ‘Jide Ajidahun
Femi Osofisan is a Marxist Nigerian playwright, scholar, critic, journalist, producer, director, and essayist.
Becoming Visible: On Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone
Very little in Jenny Erpenbeck’s previous fiction—allegorical, timeless—prepares a reader for the immediacy and moral heft of Go, Went, Gone. It asks the same question Michael Ignatieff did in his…
Conversations: Sybil Baker and Laura Catherine Brown
Sybil Baker is the author of four works of fiction, most recently While You Were Gone. Her work of nonfiction, Immigration Essays is the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s required…
What do I know of drowning? On Matt W. Miller’s The Wounded for the Water
Matt W. Miller’s latest collection, The Wounded for the Water (Salmon Poetry, 2018) opens with a preface poem that reads like a lonely sea shanty, a solitary voice singing: “Now…
A history of true civilisation is not one of monuments
Civilisation is back. But it is no longer the preserve of “Renaissance man” or of “the West,” or even of literate societies. Civilisation is a way of talking about human…
Can You Call Her Sister? Amelia Rosselli on Sylvia Plath
When the Italian poet Amelia Rosselli took her life 33 years to the day that Sylvia Plath did the same, it was not her only tribute to the American writer,…
In the Beginnings of Emotion Exists an End: on Katy Lederer’s The bright red horse—and the blue—
And since the genesis of the objective body is only a moment in the constitution of the object, the body, by withdrawing from the objective world, will carry with it…
In the gap between writer and reader, the novel comes to life
There’s an exercise I sometimes get members of book groups to do: I ask each of them to draw a picture of the cabin from my first novel, Our Endless…