Category: Reviews

In 1891, in an essay entitled “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Oscar Wilde wrote these words: “‘Know thyself’ was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, ‘Be thyself’ shall be written.” Alas, the “new world” Wilde dreamed of is yet to appear. More than a century later, we’re still trying to… Read more →

  Little gal, who knit thee? Dost thou know who knit thee? In “Self-Portrait,” the first poem of Kiki Petrosino’s third poetry collection, Witch Wife, the speaker introduces themes of origins and girlhood in the charming and danger-tinged language of fairy tale. The poem continues: “Gave thee milk & bid thee beg / Slid a purse between your legs.” This… Read more →

In art a double portrait is a painting that depicts unity or extension: the singular portrait becomes plural with the introduction of a second body into the single frame of the canvas. One body must confess or concede its link to another. What is seen and captured by the artist is the communion of two: lover and lover, enemy and… Read more →

In a 2007 interview with Tina Chang, for the Academy of American Poets, Li-Young Lee, speaks to the the poem’s genesis as inseparable from the rhythms of human nature, and from world itself: “There’s no way to account for any thing or any event. If you rigorously dissect it, you realize that everything is a shape of the totality of… Read more →

A deep, unsettling current runs through the work of Hungarian writer László Krazsnahorkai. His prose simmers and threatens, never reaching for brutality yet somehow arriving easily on the doorstep of the apocalyptic. For him. the story is in the sentence, and his sentences stretch on and on, meandering across pages and moods, shifting through phases, at times whimsical, at others… Read more →

Paul Guest’s fourth book of poems opens in a low-lit forest, a slanted landscape with “pine trees leaning in.” Guest invokes Mark Twain: “All right, then I’ll go to hell.” It’s the line muttered by Huck Finn as he abandons his religious upbringing, and chooses not to turn in Jim, his friend and runaway slave. A poem with this epigraph… Read more →

The “Melville” of Giono’s mad little book is exactly who you think it is: Herman himself, on his way to London to drop off Whitejacket with his publishers. Giono’s Melville is troubled, though. He’s fed up with his books, “he had already written them all. He felt rid of them.” Though, of course, savvy readers are aware that he hasn’t… Read more →

In his third novel, The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides invokes Tolstoy’s fable of a man chased by a beast into a well only to find an equally angry dragon at the well’s bottom. The man hangs from a branch midway between the slobbering predators. Mice begin to gnaw the branch and he knows he will soon perish. He notices a… Read more →

A princess lives in a tower. We can’t call her imprisoned as she has never attempted to leave. In fact, she has never even considered it. She spends her days reading books, with the occasional glance through the window at a world which does not interest her. Then the soldiers arrive. One brings delicacies, wrapped in white cloth. The princess… Read more →