Staff picks are short book or movie reviews written by our editors. Interviews are conversations with authors, artists, editors, and publishers.
To crave sex with the dead, to be voracious in a time of AIDS, to masturbate and discuss it, to objectify one’s genitals purely for pleasure. In reading Hemphill’s work we do not ask the poet to take responsibility for his words and desires. We soak in them instead, learning how they resonate with our own thoughts and allowing his honesty to soften the edges of our judgement.
I Found Myself itself exists as a tripartite translation, with Mahfouz moving from his unconscious to his conscious, and from the voice of the diarist to that of the writer, with Matar completing the process with a translation from Arabic to English. Matar’s remarkable ability to capture all of these dimensions, without sacrificing the stylistic qualities of Mahfouz’s prose, is what makes this translation so masterful. Whether you are interested in Arabic literature, a fan of Mahfouz’s work, or simply an admirer of dreams, there is something in this collection for everyone. If for no other reason than afterwards, after being engrossed in page after page of Mahfouz’s quiet serenity, you will feel as though you have made a new friend.
Charleen McClure’s d-sorientation is an exploration of space: the expansive empty inside humans and homes, the various rooms of the self, and how it feels to inhabit them. The selves she explores are alive and dying and dead, they are mosquitoes and mothers, and they are pressing their palms to the walls trying to map this space with their hands.
Sitting with this particular dimension of THE WESTERN––Goldsborough’s reflections on diasporic self-seeking and dreams of (re)convening with ancestors––returns me to the sculpture park at/of Opus 40. At one point in my wandering, I remember descending stone-cut steps while holding lightly to the stone-cut wall of a circular platform that the steps wrapped around. For a moment, I got the sense that I was walking through a corridor, or a larger stone enclosure, though Fite’s sculpture is not encompassed by walls.
Pig is arranged into three sections or acts: Straw, Sticks, Bricks—a reference to the three building materials that the fabled three little pigs construct their houses of to ensure, by the hair on their chinny chin chins, that the big bad wolf isn’t let in. This is the first of many pig references that appear throughout the text. Through this reference, Sax prepares readers to act as the wolf. They ask us to ready ourselves to consume the flesh and history of the pig. And so, we prepare ourselves to consume, not by huffing, puffing, and blowing through the material, but by reading voraciously through Sax’s porcine accounts.
The Manifesto is an exhaustive meditation on the relationship between leftist politics, conspiracy theories, and the pandemic. Written with a general audience in mind, the punchy and politically energizing prose of the book slots in nicely into the tradition of anonymously published, ultra-left French polemics. Like Tiqqun’s The Cybernetic Hypothesis and The Coming Insurrection by the Invisible Committee, the Manifesto is written to inspire, keeping heady concepts and references to dead philosophers to a minimum. All the more remarkable for the density of its subject matter: the history of American psychology, sociology, and behavioral science and its synonymity with the history of American political suppression, counterterrorism, and pandemic preparedness.
The brilliance of The Terrible We is that it manages to approach this difficult question with both an appreciation for the stakes at hand and with a clear sense of purpose. In Awkward-Rich’s words, The Terrible We “is a book that attempts to hold on to certain tools from disability studies—among other fields—in order to open trans studies itself up to different critical protocols.” Rather than merely declaring transfeminist struggles against depathologization or disability activists struggles against the mental-disability-as-flaw conception to be correct, Awkward-Rich instead chooses specific examples that applies some of the strategies and thinking that have come out of disability activism and studies to transness in novel and exciting ways.
Gelfman-Randazzo is 5’8” (she tells us) and also a poet. And she’s reading from her latest chapbook, Duh, in the backyard of a small used bookstore in Prospect Heights. 13 minutes past the start time, my friend finds a fortune in his jacket pocket, “Listen these next few days to your friends to get the answers you seek.” 17 minutes past the start time, they bring out wine. 22 minutes past the start time, we begin.
Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind is a spellbinding love letter to nature. The collection, separated chronologically into four seasons, opens in the spring with a description of a groundhog on its haunches, stealing tomatoes from a backyard garden. Observing this quotidian scene with unmatched curiosity, the speaker compares herself to the animal, wondering, “Why am I not allowed delight?” From this query onward, Limón revels in the interconnectedness of nature and human experience. Depicting cockroaches, lindens, forsythias, horses, and hawks, she writes of loss, infertility, and cultural and familial legacy with stunning attention to detail.
Civil Service is clearly (and self-consciously) the culmination of many years of what Fred Moten refers to as study (a “devotional, sacramental, anamonastic kind of intellectual practice”): Schwartz writes first and foremost as a reader, and the book wonders seriously and thoughtfully about state power, 21st century capitalism, race, sex, love, and even—maybe especially—metapoetics.
Homero de Aridjis’ Self Portrait in the Zone of Silence begins with “El Jaguar/ The Jaguar,” a powerful ode to the native Mexican symbol of strength and survival. The poem, composed of five parts, is a confrontation with death: the destruction of the jaguar provokes the reader to contend not only with the colonization of the Americas, but also with the poet’s own mortality.
With Isabel in tow, Warnick writes into the cracks of human experience in The Skunks—its slowness and moments of pause. The Skunks indulges in what happens between moments of definition or belonging. In The Skunks, Isabel is going nowhere really, but Warnick’s point, written in a subtle delicate prose, is that she doesn’t have to be. When the world and its infrastructure demands that Isabel define herself—her job, friendships, relationships, finances—Isabel resists, at least for the duration of the novel. We are soothed by her relative aimlessness. Maybe it’s okay to sit in a lack of definition, remain a little lost for a while, and, of course, mind the skunks.