AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW最新文献

{"title":"Wherever I'm At: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry ed. by Donald G. Evans and Robin Metz (review)","authors":"Mark Fishbein","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a921796","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a921796","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Wherever I'm At: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry</em> ed. by Donald G. Evans and Robin Metz <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Mark Fishbein (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>wherever i'm at: an anthology of chicago poetry</small></em> Edited by Donald G. Evans and Robin Metz<br/> After Hours Press and Third World Press<br/> https://thirdworldpressfoundation.org/product/wherever-im-at-an-anthology-of-chicago-poetry/<br/> 311 pages; Print, $25.00 <p>I am a poet, and a city boy, spending most of my life in Manhattan with a few years in Paris and a decade in Washington, DC. So I guess I'm a city snob. My son found himself in Chicago after college and is raising his family there, so I have visited quite frequently over the past twenty years. What was Chicago to me? \"Perhaps a nice place to live,\" I often said, \"but I wouldn't want to visit.\" Especially in winter, when even the penguins avoid it. It's the place where <em>the man danced with his wife</em> in the famous song. Deep-dish pizza to send you to the ER. Great if your passion is sky scrapper Architecture (capital A!). Eliot Ness and Al Capone. Paul Butterfield Blues Band telling me <em>son, you better get a gun</em>.</p> <p>Last week, at the time of this writing, I moved here, permanently. Family first. How serendipitous to be asked to review an anthology of 134 poets offering a poem with Chicago as the theme? How better to discover the soul of a city? Here poets were asked to do what Whitman did for New York, Baudelaire and Apollinaire for Paris, Keats for Rome, and Sandburg for Chicago (whose name is sadly not to be found in the preface or introduction, and only in 2 of the 134 poems). <strong>[End Page 127]</strong></p> <p>The sheer size of this collection is staggering. What is Chicago poetry? In the foreword, Carlo Rotella states:</p> <blockquote> <p>And I'd argue that Gwendolyn Brooks emerges here as the presiding figure of Chicago's poetic tradition.</p> </blockquote> <p>Surely a great poet, she, along with James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and so many others, has universally redefined the Black experience in the twentieth century. Her easy style and use of dialects mixed with elegance have influenced all poetry, not only the 29 percent of the Chicago population being \"Black or African American\" according to the census. But there is no \"school\" of Chicago poetry I can decipher here, only the kaleidoscope of styles familiar in today's poetry anthologies.</p> <p>As the posted theme of this book is \"Chicago,\" all the poems do mention something about the city: a street, a neighborhood, local stores, clubs, restaurants, or parks, but <em>place</em> is most often secondary to the narrative in the poem, as agreed by Mr. Rotella:</p> <blockquote> <p>Some of the subject matter that inspires the writers here may resemble what you'd find in Dayton, New York, ","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140116496","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Twenty Stories by Jack Driscoll (review)","authors":"Bob Duxbury","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a921788","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a921788","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Twenty Stories</em> by Jack Driscoll <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Bob Duxbury (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>twenty stories</small></em> Jack Driscoll<br/> Pushcart Press<br/> https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/721973/twenty-stories-by-jack-driscoll/9798985469714<br/> 280 pages; Print, $27.00 <p>If you're seeking a homegrown version of Nordic noir, with snow-flecked, frigid scenery and hardbitten characters in dysfunctional relationships intent upon a desire for justice or vengeance, then forgo Stockholm or Helsinki for Northern Michigan's veteran storyteller, Jack Driscoll, and his combination of old and new work in the recently published <em>Twenty Stories</em>.</p> <p>Not that there are so many actual crimes. There is an execution, theft and trespass, and a couple who steal a horse. But the whodunit aspect of Driscoll's work is centered upon his characters' ceaseless investigation of their own lives as a crime scene. Are they victim or perp? Sometimes only one, but often both.</p> <p>As in any investigation, we enter Driscoll's stories after the event. The character in his first story is named Judge, and a first line like \"Doyle Laidlow has never attended an execution\" assures us there's some catching up to be done. Likewise, \"here's what the guy I <em>don't</em> live with anymore said.\" Sometimes the titles alone steer us to the police blotter: \"Death Parts,\" \"Prowlers,\" or \"A Woman Gone Missing.\"</p> <p>Early in the first story, Driscoll tells us his authorial ambition:</p> <blockquote> <p>Judge said you could measure a story by its private disclosures, by how far a person came forward to confess a part of himself asking forgiveness.</p> </blockquote> <p>In this story (\"Wanting Only to be Heard\"), Judge is a teenager, aided by the narrator, who decides to make a reckless swim at night between two fishing <strong>[End Page 88]</strong> holes under a frozen lake. The fact that such a venture is both obviously dangerous and foolhardy is dismissed. Yet the narrator notes:</p> <blockquote> <p>There was something principled about facts. … Maybe that's why I liked Dragnet so much. The claim that it was a true story, and that the sentence handed down after the last TV commercial was really being served.</p> </blockquote> <p>The tension in many of the stories lies between establishing the \"crime\" and seeking some kind of personal, rather than societal, retribution. Driscoll's characters are not short of grievances, but the crimes as such do not usually fall directly under conventional jurisprudence. The characters have been victims of parental neglect, adultery, addiction, an economic system that regards them as marginal, poor education, or just plain bad luck.</p> <p>A combination of these factors infuses a new story, \"The New World Emerging,\" ostensibly referring to the mother's job in a hospi","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140116636","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Illuminated Burrow by Max Blecher (review)","authors":"Allan Graubard","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a921784","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a921784","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Illuminated Burrow</em> by Max Blecher <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Allan Graubard (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>the illuminated burrow</small></em> Max Blecher<br/> Translated by Gabi Reigh<br/> Twisted Spoon Press<br/> https://www.twistedspoon.com/illuminated-burrow.html<br/> 166 pages; Print, $23.00 <p>The intersection of illness and literature is a rich vein that authors have explored, I imagine, ever since we came to writing. Whatever its time and form, when the vulnerability of the body enters a narrative, the stakes intensify. We know the questions that come in response, too; we know them well enough, animating the page or those we ask straight out when faced with an illness: How did it happen? What's the diagnosis and treatment? How will this play out? What's expected of me, of us, and what's not? There's also something we share, isn't there; compassion for the afflicted and relief that we're healthy, or if ill then struggling for health, or some sense of it. And if seriously ill, when hope crashes against pain or the dulling effect of opiates, and convalescence becomes endurance—what then? <strong>[End Page 71]</strong></p> <p>One response—poignant, real, irrepressible, exquisite, caustic, and funny by turns—comes from Max Blecher. In English we have only met him recently, with the 2015 translation of his novel <em>Adventures in Immediate Irreality</em> (1936). In <em>The Illuminated Burrow</em>, the work reviewed here, illness is the cause and inspiration. There is nothing that Blecher has written that is not fed by his convalescent experience either. Tuberculosis spondylitis, or Pott disease (causing bone destruction, deformity, and paraplegia), was incurable when he wrote the book. Nonetheless, by it, but not only it, he valorized the \"secret life of the body\" and the intimate vision he brought to the literature he created and the world he knew. He wrote the book in bed, too, completely immobilized, the bed he died in that same year, 1938.</p> <p>Blecher was born in 1909 to bourgeois Jewish parents in Botoșani, a town in northeast Romania, and spent his school years in Roman, some fifty miles distant. After graduating, he went to study medicine in Paris. There, in 1928, symptoms appeared, and the diagnosis. He became paraplegic, though he briefly regained mobility, endured long periods in a body cast and frequent medical interventions, and was carted about in different wheelchairs and carriages. Desperate to regain his health, he spent the next decade in sanatoriums in Switzerland, France, and Romania. By 1935, with further treatment useless, his family brought him back to Roman, but this time on the outskirts. He continued writing, and corresponded with leading authors and philosophers: André Breton (who published Blecher in the journal <em>Le Surréalisme au service de la révolu","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140105549","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organizations and the Arts ed. by Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty (review)","authors":"Hannah Grannemann","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a921775","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a921775","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organizations and the Arts</em> ed. by Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Hannah Grannemann (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>radical friends: decentralised autonomous organizations and the arts</small></em> Edited by Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty<br/> Torque Editions<br/> https://torquetorque.net/publications/radical-friends/<br/> 352 pages; Print, £20.00 <p>What are decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) in the art world? They are \"cosmic computers.\" They are utopian experiments: \"an experimental practice for moving towards a different way of living together.\" They are cooperatives or collectives that \"enlarge the reach of friendship to the point of replacing corporations and governments.\" Or they're \"implicitly antisocial.\" DAOs will completely reinvent artists' relationships to the art market. Or they're just \"shinier versions of the same shit.\" Or maybe they are starfish.</p> <p>I came to <em>Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organizations and the Arts</em> as a bit of an outsider; I have significant arts management experience, but I don't work in the contemporary art field. At a fundamental level, as I learned in the introduction by editors Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty, DAOs are organizations that exist online and are built on the blockchain. DAOs are collectively owned by their members. Decisions about the DAO itself (its governance) and its activities are voted on by the members using \"smart contracts,\" so called because the outcomes of the smart contracts are automatically executed and cannot be changed except through votes by the membership of the DAO. This allows them to be \"trustless\" organizations, meaning that trust between the members is not required, because of the automaticity of the smart contracts. Beyond that, DAOs can be many different things, including artworks themselves.</p> <p>The goal of <em>Radical Friends</em> is to bring together writings by the people working with DAOs to show \"how traditional organisational patterns and the power structures they serve might be transformed by the emergence of blockchain-enabled Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) in artworlds and beyond.\" The traditional organizational patterns the editors and authors are referring to is how artists intersect with the international art <strong>[End Page 21]</strong> market, museums, each other, all the related funding sources, and more. Artists and arts workers often view these patterns as extractive and exploitative. The search for more equitable systems is long-standing and ongoing. The purpose of the book is not to persuade the reader that DAOs are <em>the</em> solution to the art world's problems, but instead to \"support deep thinking, inspiration, praxis and prototyping.\"</p> <p>The problem with DAOs is t","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"286 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140105601","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest by Laura Raicovich (review)","authors":"Terry Smith","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a921776","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a921776","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest</em> by Laura Raicovich <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Terry Smith (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>culture strike: art and museums in an age of protest</small></em> Laura Raicovich<br/> Verso<br/> https://www.versobooks.com/books/3777-culture-strike<br/> 224 pages; Print, $26.95 <p><em>Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest</em> begins with a vivid account of the circumstances that forced Laura Raicovich out of the directorship of the Queens Museum of Art, New York. When she took up the position in 2015 she inherited a not-for-profit art space that, under the previous director, Tom Finkelpearl, had pioneered responsiveness to local communities while remaining relevant to the wider region and to international visitors. This mission was not confined to an exhibition program known for landmarks such as <em>Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1970s</em> (1999). Community organizers were appointed to the museum's staff. They worked directly with groups throughout one of the most diverse boroughs in the city, serving the various needs of those speaking 138 languages and dialects. Finkelpearl went on to pursue similar policies as commissioner of the New York Department of Cultural Affairs from 2014 to 2019.</p> <p>Seen more broadly, these initiatives were instances within the wave of reforms that had for decades been sweeping through all kinds of museums as they strove to reconcile their traditional top-down educational missions with the diversity of their massively increasing numbers of interested visitors. Progressive reforms met much resistance, most insidiously the defunding of culture by neoliberal governments at all levels. Yet what is now three generations of arts administrators have persisted with these reforms, working in concert with the mainly progressive arts practices that they so passionately support.</p> <p>In the United States in late 2016 this commitment ran up against what Raicovich rightly calls the \"Pandora's box of hate\" unleashed by the Trump administration's rhetoric and policies. Its multimedia storm of populist nationalism targeted immigrants, foreigners, and the local elites that welcomed them. For the Queens Museum this meant several staff members, its community program, and eventually its director. Raicovich did not hesitate to <strong>[End Page 26]</strong> commit the museum to joining the art strike called for January 10, 2017, Inauguration Day, staging a teach-in in the atrium. She posted \"a re-statement of values\" asserting that the museum had \"a deep commitment to freedom of expression, and intentionally supports and celebrates difference and multiplicity as fundamental to our collective liberation.\" Specifically, the Queens Museum \"advocates for art as a tool for positive social change, critical t","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140105608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Art of Diremption: On the Powerlessness of Art by Leonhard Emmerling (review)","authors":"Gavin Sourgen","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a921778","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a921778","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Art of Diremption: On the Powerlessness of Art</em> by Leonhard Emmerling <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Gavin Sourgen (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>the art of diremption: on the powerlessness of art</small></em> Leonhard Emmerling<br/> Translated by Parnal Chirmuley<br/> Seagull Books<br/> https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/A/bo165272877.html<br/> 164 pages; Print, $24.50 <p>While the precise object of his discontent is never explicitly stated, Leonhard Emmerling's antipathy toward a pervasive \"overburdening of art as the great redeemer\"—one that has produced \"an almost relentless spate of exposures and revelations, interventions and calls to participation\" in the contemporary art world—seems to have in mind a growing belief in the merits of social justice art and, perhaps more damningly, those who naively assume a stable relation between intention and embodiment, conception and reception. Although he never pitches it as a dilemma, <em>The Art of Diremption</em> certainly reads as a response to one. As Emmerling sees it, the \"assumption that art has a unique ability to bring truth to light\" is born out of, among other things, a fundamental misunderstanding of \"the dialectic of appearance and elusion\" in art, and a lost sense of how this \"reveals [the] truth about its dual composition as reality and appearance.\" In other words, by forsaking a nuanced understanding of a crucial differentiation between appearance and reality—\"the key differentiation in aesthetics,\" as he sees it—and laboring under a misplaced burden of uncomplicated mimesis, we fail to see that art relinquishes its ontological status as art at the very moment it insists on having a clear intent and impact. When art is \"semantically overdetermined,\" when \"the modernist paradigm of the opposition between art and society that is coming apart at the seams is looked upon as no longer appropriate yet indispensable,\" the \"discourse on art has to be pumped full with the force of the radical as a compensatory surrogate.\" In this way, art is \"inflated by … moral fervour,\" and \"the sweeping proclamations about art not only reek of arbitrariness\" but ultimately \"fail its object.\" Such beliefs are also, above all else, counterproductive in bolstering arguments for the value of aesthetic judgment as a means <strong>[End Page 35]</strong> of moral good because any insistence upon the moral worth of a work of art, and any attempt to measure and justify the range of its influence, is bound to produce the wrong kind of diremption: not the generative and unifying force of internal doubt and uncertainty at the heart of aesthetic engagement, but pronounced critical hostility and division.</p> <p>Emmerling sees this current overinvestment in the notion of art as a reconciler of social disparity and a deliverer of moral good to be t","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"43 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140105611","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Point of View and Cognitive Mapping: The Case of Mrs. Dalloway","authors":"Robert T. Tally Jr.","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a921790","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a921790","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Point of View and Cognitive Mapping<span>The Case of <em>Mrs. Dalloway</em></span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Robert T. Tally Jr. (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Given its cast of perambulating characters and its distinctive registration of the geography of central London, <em>Mrs. Dalloway</em> (1925) has become something of a canonical text in spatial literary studies, as students and critics have traced out the itineraries of Clarissa, Peter Walsh, or Septimus Smith, either literally—see the \"Mrs. Dalloway Mapping Project\" (http://mrsdallowaymappingproject.weebly.com/index.html), for example—or more informally in their own minds. The movements of the characters in the city streets, combined with the involuntary memories and subsequent reflections sparked by their peripatetic perspectives, renders a narrative that appears devoted to the experience and conception of <em>time</em> as one that is equally attuned to <em>space</em>, and in particular, the distinctive social space in which such experiences take place. Then there is the prevalence of distinctive toponyms and municipal monuments, such as Bond Street, Regent's Park, Shaftesbury Avenue, and the omnipresent Big Ben, whose tolling of the hours punctuates the novel with a portentous ringing of sonic waves and circles. These, too, give <em>Mrs. Dalloway</em> the appearance of being a sort a spatial narrative, such that we might say that a literary geography of London emerges in its pages.</p> <p>Of course, this is where I feel the need to add a properly Woolfian caveat: It is true that, when one thinks of space in relation to the novel, the first consideration is usually the depiction of specific spaces or places in the text. This is sometimes thought of as the \"storyworld,\" the area in which the events of the novel take place. A storyworld could be entirely imaginary, such as Terry Pratchett's Discworld in his marvelous series of satirical fantasy novels, or it could closely resemble the geographical spaces of the real world, as with the gritty realism of Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles in <em>The Big Sleep</em> (1939) and other works. Or it might combine some aspects of the two, as in William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, which undoubtedly resembles the real <strong>[End Page 99]</strong> Lafayette County, Mississippi, but which has developed its own mythic history over the course of Faulkner's writings once populated with Compsons, Bundrens, and Snopeses. The basic geography and distinctive places in a novel are powerfully effective in orienting the reader and establishing the setting of the fictional world.</p> <p>But, then, no matter how much a given storyworld makes reference to places in the so-called real world, the spaces of a novel are necessarily <em>imaginary</em> by virtue of being part of that fictional universe. As Woolf herself observed in her 1905 essay, \"Lit","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140116304","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Foundlings: Found Poems from Prose by DeWitt Henry (review)","authors":"Michael Joyce","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a921792","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a921792","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Foundlings: Found Poems from Prose</em> by DeWitt Henry <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Michael Joyce (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>foundlings: found poems from prose</small></em> DeWitt Henry<br/> Gazebo Books<br/> https://gazebobooks.com.au/product/foundlings/<br/> 142 pages; Print, $20.00 <p>In Wallace Stevens's long poem \"The Comedian as the Letter C,\" his perhaps comic, vaguely semi-autobiographical character, the poet and \"introspective voyager\" Crispin, sails from \"Bordeaux to Yucatan, Havana next, / And then to,\" well, (North) Carolina, where, having seen \"how much / Of what he saw he never saw at all,\" Crispin</p> <blockquote> <p><span> gripped more closely the essential prose</span><span>As being, in a world so falsified,</span><span>The one integrity for him, the one</span><span>Discovery still possible to make,</span><span>To which all poems were incident, unless</span><span>That prose should wear a poem's guise at last.</span></p> </blockquote> <p>In his extraordinary career, DeWitt Henry has come to see much of what without him—as essayist, fiction writer, professor, founding editor of <em>Ploughshares</em>, and now in this first book of poems, <em>Foundlings</em>—we might not have come upon elsewise. Here, prose indeed morphs to \"wear a poem's guise\" as Henry crafts discoveries of integrity and grace from well-known (even beloved) prose, found poems that seem not merely (co)incident but immanent. In the process he charts new channels to sail among the straits of what we think we know after a century at least of found poetry from Blaise Cendrars to Annie Dillard to Mary Rueffle.</p> <p>A found poem must hew, perhaps not obviously, to constraints and procedures <strong>[End Page 111]</strong> not unlike those of Oulipo. The first being that the would-be poet—the \"finder\"—must actively <em>find</em> in the often overlooked quotidian of familiar texts a \"new\" text whose sound and sense (to use traditional, if not outmoded, literary terms) are the overlooked (and/or unsounded) <em>here</em> in <u>there</u>.</p> <p>Geoff Bouvier's 2016 essay on the prose poem as a \"more rigorous text\" offers an exercise for teasing out whether \"breaking our prose sentences into poetic lines as a temporary editing gesture [might] help to strengthen those sentences … reconstituted as prose.\" His example takes \"a block of simple prose writing,\" a weather report \"lifted purely at random from a national news source,\" and \"look[s] at the same prose in a completely different typographical arrangement … to see what this prose needs to make it more visual and aural, more charged, more intense, more 'poetic.'\"</p> <p>In his \"Author's Note,\" Henry expands upon this basic constraint of both verbal and visual designing as a process of finding \"how lines became verses and verses became stanzas; how blank spaces or 'sile","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"55 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140116534","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Place Where Grief Begins by Christopher Hirschmann Brandt (review)","authors":"Patricia Laurence","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a921794","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a921794","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Place Where Grief Begins</em> by Christopher Hirschmann Brandt <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Patricia Laurence (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>the place where grief begins</small></em> Christopher Hirschmann Brandt<br/> Tebot Bach<br/> https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781939678928/the-place-where-grief-begins.aspx<br/> 65 pages; Print, $17.00 <p><em>The Place Where Grief Begins</em> is a collection of poems in memory of Barbara Vann, the founder of the wonderful Medicine Show Theater and other Maine and New York companies. Christopher Brandt worked with Vann for forty-three years, joining the company in 1973 and serving in different capacities from administrator to set designer and builder to writer to actor. After Vann's death in 2015, he managed the company until its closing in 2020.</p> <p>The heartfelt, poignant poems of friendship and love in this volume—elegies—are tributes to Vann's \"genius,\" her beauty, their love, and her teaching; importantly, they attest to the continued \"presence\" of Vann's absence. Brandt writes:</p> <blockquote> <p><span>I know now how it was with Orpheus</span><span>Though I lack his lyre</span><span>I would strip my spirit naked</span><span>Before the god of death to beg her back.</span></p> </blockquote> <p>He asserts in the title poem, \"The Place Where Grief Begins,\" that</p> <blockquote> <p><span>that place</span><span>is no place</span><span>for tears</span></p> </blockquote> <p>The poems evolve through various stages of love, death, and grief. There is sensual celebration, as the speaker says she is \"burned\" into his flesh. In \"Goddesses\" he celebrates \"touch\":</p> <blockquote> <p><span>Hold me holding you, for it is but in touch</span><span>of flesh on flesh, in smell and taste, <strong>[End Page 119]</strong></span> <span>in fleeting things, in all that is put out</span><span>by death, that we can ride the sky like gods.</span></p> </blockquote> <p>He recounts everyday pleasures during her illness in \"Putting on Your Socks\":</p> <blockquote> <p><span>will they fit? They do, a treat. Your</span><span>warm tee shirt</span></p> </blockquote> <p>But then, in the grip of death,</p> <blockquote> <p><span>My love grows too weak to stand up</span><span>By herself …</span><span>. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .</span><span>Later I hold her under her shoulders</span><span>And lift her up. She is heavy already</span><span>With death, though neither of us</span><span>Speaks the words.</span></p> </blockquote> <p>We read of the denial of death as the speaker cries,</p> <blockquote> <p><span>No! I will not let him take you.</span><span>But suddenly I'm holding only bones.</span></p> </blockquote> <p>There is an honesty in these sensuous poems, as Brandt holds onto his love as long as he can but admits to repulsion in \"The Smell\":</p> <blockquote> <p","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140116787","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class by Cynthia Cruz (review)","authors":"Josh Polinard","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a921803","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a921803","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class</em> by Cynthia Cruz <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Josh Polinard (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>the melancholia of class: a manifesto for the working class</small></em> Cynthia Cruz<br/> Repeater<br/> https://repeaterbooks.com/product/the-melancholia-of-class-a-manifesto-for-the-working-class/<br/> 228 pages; Print, $14.95 <p>Robin DiAngelo's bestseller <em>White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism</em> (2018) opens with a quote by Charles Baudelaire, arguably most known nowadays as a popular line from the 1995 film <em>The Usual Suspects</em>: \"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.\" The allusion implies that the most effective means of addressing white supremacy in the US is to first regard it as an insidious, silent oppressor, lurking in the shadows of a clandestine, all-but-completely-disavowed white privilege rather than solely as a signifier for pointy white hats and swastika-clad purveyors of amphetamines.</p> <p>Cynthia Cruz's <em>The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class</em> cautions us of a similar form of disavowal—one that secures the advantage of the ruling class by insisting there simply <em>is no</em> working class in the United States. As Cruz states in chapter 3, \"Neoliberalism's message … states vehemently that we are all born with the same privileges, that we all have the same advantages, and that those who do not succeed have only their own ineptitude and/or laziness to blame.\"</p> <p>Although the bulk of Cruz's manifesto outlines the trajectory of other working-class artists' fulfillment of the rags-to-riches myth—albeit in a manner that calls the <em>fulfillment</em> part into question—it is the close examinations of her own struggle as a working-class author that are perhaps the most poignant. As she states in the previously mentioned chapter: <strong>[End Page 162]</strong></p> <blockquote> <p>When during my two years in the [MFA writing program] I was told repeatedly by my classmates and my professors that my poems made no sense, I felt ashamed and assumed, automatically, that they were right. As a result, I deleted large portions of my writing. It took me decades to recognize that the very things I was erasing in my writing were class-based, which is to say that what my classmates and teachers were unable to comprehend was my worldview. When I am told to make my work more \"clear,\" what I am actually being told is to make my writing adhere to a certain cultural aesthetic, which is formed and determined by middle-class writers and editors … assimilating into the literary elite is the payoff.</p> </blockquote> <p>What Cruz shares here speaks to the melancholia referred to in the title of the book, which Freud, in his essay \"","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140105432","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}