AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW最新文献

{"title":"The Literary Assistant as Point Guard","authors":"E. Ethelbert Miller","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a921789","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a921789","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 --> The Literary Assistant as Point Guard <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> E. Ethelbert Miller (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Is there an app that keeps track of how many books an author signs? In the old days, successful writers had book tours that took them to many major cities. Folks would wait patiently in long lines for the autograph, the signature that too often resembled hieroglyphics. The author with bent head might make small talk with the person whose book he or she was signing. Casual conversations at books signings are similar to what one encounters at airports and on train rides; seldom do they last beyond the destination and the departing.</p> <p>Then there are magical moments of connection. A writer talks to someone after a reading, lecture, or workshop. The conversation opens the door to the various levels and degrees of life. The author becomes linked to another person like stanzas and paragraphs. Words suddenly make sense. A sentence is completed while punctuation, like time, becomes something to cherish.</p> <p>I think of this when I think about Kirsten Porter. Now I think about her all the time, because we work together and she is my literary assistant. When we first met, in 2007, she was an undergraduate student at Marymount University. Upon first impression one might mistake her for a young nun living in France. Slender and small, she conveyed a spiritual sweetness when we talked, a kindness that elevated her and enlarged her size and frame. I can't recall what we first discussed or how we quickly found ourselves renovating the first floor of a place for our friendship. I did, however, stay in touch during the time she was enrolled in the creative writing program at George Mason University. Kirsten claims I called the director of the MFA program and encouraged him to find a slot for her. Perhaps this is folklore. I do know it was poetry that brought us together, and maybe during that first meeting at Marymount I was simply autographing a book for her.</p> <p>I never know what to say in an autograph. Maybe there should be a workshop on this. Just signing one's name is the equivalent to having an ink stamper. <strong>[End Page 93]</strong> Writing just \"thanks\" and \"love\" above one's name tends to have no true meaning and is the equivalent to a fist bump. A longer written statement in a book is just a caress and comes nowhere near being a French kiss. I've never signed anyone's book in a way that might make them blush or fear lending their book to someone.</p> <p>These are the small things writers are seldom instructed on. How might an autographed book influence a critic many years later? Is it important to know that Langston Hughes often signed his signature in green?</p> <p>In basketball, a good point guard is essential to having success on the court. Managing the clock is similar to managing a career. I prefer to view ","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140116539","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":"BRUT: Writings on Art & Artists by Harold Jaffe (review)","authors":"Eckhard Gerdes","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a921802","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a921802","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>BRUT: Writings on Art & Artists</em> by Harold Jaffe <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Eckhard Gerdes (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>brut: writings on art & artists</small></em> Harold Jaffe<br/> Anti-Oedipus Press<br/> https://anti-oedipuspress.com/books/brut/<br/> 144 pages; Print, $16.95 <p>Harold Jaffe's transgressive fictions range from the social critique of his novel <em>Mole's Pity</em> (1979), through his fiction treatments of celebrity in <em>Madonna & Other Spectacles</em> (1988), <em>15 Serial Killers</em> (2003), and <em>Brando Bleeds</em> (2022), and carry on throughout his disturbing and astute docufictions such as <em>Porn-Anti-Porn</em> (2019) and <em>False Positive</em> (2002). But in all cases, Jaffe makes one consistent decision as a writer: the dominant methods of employing fiction are not the essential basis of literary art.</p> <p>What makes Jaffe's writing unique is, perhaps, how he creatively and effectively combines the strategies and techniques of fiction with nonfiction. His docufictions blur the distinction between the two. In that sense, Jaffe's work reimagines the first dictum of the English novel: the pretense of being nonfiction. Readers of eighteenth-century novels must have realized that writers such as Defoe and Swift were not actually relating true accounts but were using nonfiction as a conceit upon which to build their novels. This process has been thoroughly discussed in Lennard Davis's <em>Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel</em> (1997), which traces the history of the novel from the printed ballad, which was ostensibly the sharing of the \"news\" (cf. <em>novellus</em> in Latin), to the adoption of the conceit by eighteenth-century novelists. But the factuality of the work was not a real issue. It only had to look like that. <strong>[End Page 158]</strong> Present-day readers can read <em>The Onion</em> or the satire of \"The Borowitz Report\" without believing the stories are true. This synthesis of fact and fiction was foundational in the novel but has been misunderstood and misused by scores of writers who believe that they are so special that all a novel really needs to be is a <em>roman à clef</em>. Indeed, hundreds of these works are of the type that I call \"I hate my parents\" or \"I screwed my grad student\" novels. And though some value can be found in these works, the novel as a form is much larger than that. It can certainly be used for social purposes, but is a work whose goal is to effect social change primarily social commentary or a literary novel? What destination is the author driving toward? Is the goal social commentary or literary excellence? Those are clearly separate and distinct goals. Which of those choices is more important to the author? We should not conflate astute social commentary with literary excellence.</p> ","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"205 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140107749","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":"A Suite of Dances by Mark Weiss (review)","authors":"Christopher Winks","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a921798","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a921798","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>A Suite of Dances</em> by Mark Weiss <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Christopher Winks (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>a suite of dances</small></em> Mark Weiss<br/> Shearsman Books<br/> https://www.shearsman.com/store/Mark-Weiss-A-Suite-of-Dances-p376037591<br/> 204 pages; Print, £14.95 <p>The title of Mark Weiss's full-length poetic sequence immediately conjures up associations with the transformations of dance rhythms by the likes of Bach and Handel, wherein popular musical idioms are subjected to harmonic variation, contrapuntal voicings, and other techniques of sublimation/etherealization. As with these Baroque composers, albeit in words, Weiss explores the multiple possibilities and ramifications of the languages of dance within that most Terpsichorean of verbal forms: poetry. Johan Huizinga's analysis in <em>Homo Ludens</em> (1938) of dance as \"a particular and particularly perfect form of playing\" and poetry's affinity with play as \"apparent in the structure of creative imagination itself\" is especially relevant to Weiss's project, where (to quote Huizinga again) \"the words themselves lift the poem, in part at least, out of pure play into the sphere of ideation and judgment.\"</p> <p>Within that sphere, one might think back to Ezra Pound's \"dance of the intellect among words,\" which certainly holds validity here—Weiss notes \"the dance of words / as fixed as a minuet\"—but to my mind, the precursor text of which <em>A Suite of Dances</em> is an extension is William Carlos Williams's \"Desert Music\": \"How shall we get said what must be said? // … // Only the counted poem, to an exact measure: / to imitate, not to copy nature, not / to copy nature // NOT, prostrate, to copy nature / but a dance!\" Effectively challenging Huizinga's declaration that \"music never leaves the play-sphere,\" Weiss tips his hat to Williams with a subversive alteration of one of the older poet's most often-quoted observations: \"No ideas / but in music / No music / but in things.\" And this book dances to the ever-changing music of/in things, memories, encounters, life itself in all its precarious wonder: \"So, in the larger space / as well, and dance, and dance.\"</p> <p><em>A Suite of Dances</em> consists of twenty-seven sections, each composed of an <strong>[End Page 137]</strong> individual title and numerous separately titled short poems—some as brief as a single word—indented from the \"primary\" (left-aligned) poem to which they are in a way counter-statements or variations, even at times digressions. What stands out immediately is Weiss's breadth of perception: his noticings often take the form of flashes and glimmers, signs of someone always involved with his surroundings and whose consciousness actively interacts with and processes that which befalls and that which is the case. Moments of quasi-Wittgensteinian philosoph","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"123 5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140116297","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":"Panentheism: Ontology of the Future, or Poetics?","authors":"Daniel T. O'Hara","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a921806","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a921806","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 --> Panentheism<span>Ontology of the Future, or Poetics?</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Daniel T. O'Hara (bio) </li> </ul> <p>\"Panentheism\" in theology is the belief in the co-inherence of God and the world. However else God and the world are defined, it is this relationship that distinguishes it. Neither absolute transcendence nor total immanence describes God vis-à-vis the world or the world vis-à-vis God. Similarly, the world, while emerging or emanating from God, is not God's mere reflective mirror, but instead, by virtue of its divine inherence, acts as provocation to divine development. Unlike, say, Gnosticism, in which there are two or more divinities—the original alien god whose plenum or extended presence contains the God of this world (or Demiurge) who constructs it, and many archons or minor administrative, largely evil heads of the cosmos—panentheism argues for all beings as gods-in-potential expression. The violence of all this onto-theological procession, as you might imagine, is internalized and externalized, leaving no being long at peace before a new event of co-inherence arises to produce a new phase.</p> <p>I became interested in panentheism in part as a response to my reading of <em>Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future</em>, a provocative 2021 book by Zahi Zalloua, and Cormac McCarthy's award-winning Border Trilogy of the 1990s (<em>All the Pretty Horses</em> [1992], <em>The Crossing</em> [1994], and <em>Cities of the Plain</em> [1998]), which led me into reading McCarthy's entire work and that of many of his scholarly commentators. McCarthy has long been seen, at least partially, as putting Gnosticism to use in generating the mythological dimensions of his fictions, and given the superb promptings of Zalloua's book (is our species already in an inchoate posthuman state?), I became hooked. The term <em>panentheism</em> itself I first observed in Steven Frye's introduction to his edited collection of critical essays on McCarthy in the Cambridge Companion Series (2013).</p> <p>Zalloua introduces the reader to the emergent ontologies of cyborgs, animals, material objects, and Black Being (with a line through the second <strong>[End Page 174]</strong> term). All of these topics are read by their theoretical champions as being at the center of their critical movements, all of which are components of a new materialism and a radical, often racially informed polemical critique of all that has been in the name of what must become, in this present moment of universal crisis. The interface between machine and human, animal and human, real-world objects and humans, and Afro-pessimists and conventional left-wing ideologues (who are for only a piecemeal peaceful change) forecast what has already emerged elsewhere and is now pervading American society: a quest to move beyond all inherited and too-well understood ","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"121 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140105380","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 Story of NFTs: Artists, Technology, and Democracy by Amy Whitaker and Nora Burnett Abrams (review)","authors":"Jessi Rae Morton","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a921774","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a921774","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 Story of NFTs: Artists, Technology, and Democracy</em> by Amy Whitaker and Nora Burnett Abrams <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jessi Rae Morton (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>the story of nfts: artists, technology, and democracy</small></em> Amy Whitaker and Nora Burnett Abrams<br/> Rizzoli Electa<br/> https://www.rizzoliusa.com/book/9780847899364<br/> 144 pages; Print, $32.50 <p>In <em>The Story of NFTs: Artists, Technology, and Democracy</em>, Amy Whitaker and Nora Burnett Abrams provide a thoughtful and well-designed overview of the role of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) in the art world as well as the relationships between NFTs and art history. The authors acknowledge often that NFTs are relatively new and that therefore the book can offer little in terms of future predictions or assertions about the long-term effects of NFTs on artists and art markets. Instead, Whitaker and Abrams seek to engage with numerous questions about blockchain technologies—including NFTs and DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations). To address such questions, some definitions are necessary; Whitaker and Abrams cover key concepts and terms early in the book, and they also provide an appendix that walks the reader through the process of minting an NFT. The appendix defines and explains platforms, protocols, wallets, keys, and smart contracts—all concepts that are mentioned earlier in the book, but with which some readers may prefer to spend additional time. <em>The Story of NFTs</em> is not exhaustively entry-level; readers who are already familiar with the basics of NFTs and block-chain technology will still find much to learn, and less familiar readers will get quick, direct definitions that allow them to move on to the more interesting, though less technical, aspects of the topic. <em>The Story of NFTs</em> is predominantly interested in the relationship between NFTs, blockchain technology, and visual arts, and so the technological elements—though important and duly attended to—do not take over the book.</p> <p>The book's introduction calls attention to two key moments in recent art history—the Association of Art Museum Directors COVID-19-related decision to loosen sales restrictions on museums for two years and the March 2021 sale of Beeple's NFT <em>Everydays: The First 5000 Days</em> for over $69 million. These two events serve to characterize recent disruption within the art world, <strong>[End Page 17]</strong> but they are not the source of the disruption. Whitaker and Abrams point to these moments to illustrate how NFTs moved to the forefront of art discussions in the past few years, then trace the history from which these moments grew. They set out to \"understand NFTs not as an alien landing but instead as part of the history of art.\" When considered in this light, NFTs appear as a development in the art ","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"41 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140105388","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":"Particularly the Press","authors":"Charles Alexander","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a921804","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a921804","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 --> Particularly the Press <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Charles Alexander (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Often I have wished to gather into a room, for a conversation if not a lifetime of conversations, a few women writers of the early twentieth century, specifically, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). They are all, in their own way, Curies \"of the laboratory / of vocabulary,\" as Mina Loy (who should also be in this group) described Gertrude Stein in a poem. Anyone who has run a press might think that a \"laboratory of vocabulary\" is a kind of euphemism for a printing room. All four of these women at one time or another were either publishers or editors, of books and/or journals that helped fuel a burgeoning modernist movement, that truly <em>made it new</em>, and in some ways remade the world. You might think Woolf (who is the one who more than the others got her hands inky while printing) is the only one of these writers who is not a poet, but not when one encounters a passage such as this from <em>The Waves</em> (1931):</p> <blockquote> <p>I do not know—your days and hours pass like the boughs of forest trees and the smooth green of forest rides to a hound running on the scent. But there is no single scent, no single body for me to follow. And I have no face. I am like the foam that races over the beach or the moonlight that falls arrowlike here on a tin can, here on a spike of the mailed sea holly, or a bone or a half-eaten boat. I am whirled down caverns, and flap like paper against endless corridors, and must press my hand against the wall to draw myself back.</p> </blockquote> <p>I think one might, at the least, consider her a poet in prose, one of the three or so finest poets in prose we have ever had in the English language. That she was also quite serious as a publisher enchants the imagination, that is, how did she manage it all? She had help, of course, in her most supportive husband, Leonard. Such an enterprise had a rather casual beginning, or so it seems when we consider her diary entry for her birthday, January 26, 1915: <strong>[End Page 166]</strong></p> <blockquote> <p>I don't know when I have enjoyed a birthday so much—not since I was a child anyhow. Sitting at tea we decided three things: in the first place to take Hogarth [a new place to live], if we can get it; in the second, to buy a Printing press; in the third to buy a Bull dog, probably called John. I am very much excited at the idea of all three—particularly the press. I was also given a packet of sweets to bring home.</p> </blockquote> <p>So began the adventure of the Hogarth Press, which the Woolfs named after their new home. I was moved to write this column essay when I found out that one of the many books from the Hogarth Press was <em>Composition as Explanation</em> (1926), by Gertrude Stein, which begins in a way that speaks of bo","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140105563","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 Translation Stone","authors":"Brian O'Keeffe","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a921791","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a921791","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 --> The Translation Stone <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Brian O'Keeffe (bio) </li> </ul> <p>In 1799, a large stone was discovered in Egypt. Inscribed on its surface were texts in Greek, demotic, and hieroglyphs. Would this stone permit the hitherto undecipherable hieroglyphs of the ancient Egyptians to be understood? Key to unlocking the secrets of the Egyptian script was that the three languages incised on the stone were equivalent to one another: each was a translation of the other. In a few short years, the code was broken and the hieroglyphic riddle solved. Finally the meaning of those elegantly oval eyes, proud-beaked falcons, and bulbous scarab beetles was translated into French and English. Egypt—the entire country a scroll of lapidary writing unfurling from obelisk to pyramid to temple complex and burial chamber—now became legible. The Rosetta Stone, as it's now known, of course, is the emblematic artifact of translation itself. It is the translation stone.</p> <p>Before Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion accomplished their translation work, the Egyptian hieroglyph was, along with the Sphinx, a byword for enigma itself. Greeks, Romans, and Ottomans attempted the translation, but in vain. But as much as hieroglyphics daunted all those who attempted to penetrate their glyptic secrecies, some wondered whether they also represented an ideal language, as if pictograms might somehow be more expressive of concepts and ideas than the writing systems of Greek or Latin. Plotinus, in his <em>Enneads</em>, speaking of \"the wise of Egypt,\" remarked that \"in their effort towards philosophical statement, they left aside the writing-forms that take in the detail of words and sentences—those characters that represent sounds and convey the propositions of reasoning—and drew pictures instead, engraving in the temple-inscriptions a separate image for every separate item.\" Discreteness, rather than the clotted details of words forming into sentences, is what Plotinus likes here: perhaps philosophy is better articulated when one image expresses one distinct idea, no more, no less. \"Thus,\" writes Plotinus, \"they exhibited the mode in which the Supreme goes forth.\" As philosophy <strong>[End Page 105]</strong> dreamed its dreams of Supreme Ideas, ideal Essences and Forms, the desire for a universal, indeed primordial language accompanied that dream. In his work <em>Oedipus Aegyptiacus</em> (1652–54) Athanasius Kircher claimed not only to have translated the Egyptian hieroglyphs but also that Adam and Eve spoke that language in the Garden of Eden. And the frontispiece to Johann Becher's 1661 book, <em>Character pro notitia linguarum universali</em>, another proposal for a universal language, depicts his characters inscribed on an Egyptian obelisk. The investment in Egyptian hieroglyphs waxed and waned with the centuries, some countering ","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140116538","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":"Again, the Dawn: New and Selected Poems, 1976–2022 by Grace Shulman (review)","authors":"Hilary Sideris","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a921797","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a921797","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>Again, the Dawn: New and Selected Poems, 1976–2022</em> by Grace Shulman <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Hilary Sideris (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>again, the dawn: new and selected poems, 1976–2022</small></em> Grace Shulman<br/> Turtle Point Press<br/> https://www.turtlepointpress.com/books/again-the-dawn-new-and-selected-poems-1976-2022/<br/> 280 pages; Print, $22.00 <p>Grace Shulman, master of many poetic forms and beloved poet-citizen of New York City, has published a second volume of selected poems, <em>Again, the Dawn: New and Selected Poems, 1976–2022</em>. Her earlier collection of selected poems, <em>Days of Wonder: New and Selected Poems</em>, was published in 2002. Shulman's poems go well beyond personal narrative to encompass a range of human experience and thought. They allude to cultural figures and artists as well as humbler folk from the past. David Mason described her as a poet attuned to the past, \"hearing footsteps and looking under her own soles to see what is there,\" feeling the vibrations of other times and people. But Shulman does not shrink from autobiography, and her poems often grapple with intense pain and grief.</p> <p>\"Without a Claim,\" the title poem from Shulman's 2013 collection, ponders the fallacy of human ownership of the natural world through the lens of the American immigrant experience. The poem recounts the poet's uncomprehending experience of becoming a landowner. \"I couldn't take it in,\" Shulman writes,</p> <blockquote> <p><span>when told I owned this land with oaks and maples</span><span>scattered like crowds on Sundays, and an underground</span><span>strung not with pipes but snaky roots that writhed</span></p> <p><span>when my husband sank a rhododendron,</span><span>now flaunting pinks high as an attic window.</span><span>The land we call our place was never ours.</span></p> </blockquote> <p>The waves of immigrants who arrived in New York after its \"discovery\" by Europeans, the poet's ancestors among them, came from places where they had nothing, in the hope of having something to call their own. Yet the land's <strong>[End Page 132]</strong> truest owners, the Montauks, were the only ones able to understand that it wasn't even theirs:</p> <blockquote> <p><span>If it belonged to anyone, it was</span><span>the Montauk chief who traded it for mirrors,</span><span>knowing it wasn't his. Not the sailors</span></p> <p><span>who brought the blacksmith iron, nor the farmers</span><span>who dried salt hay, nor even the later locals,</span><span>whale hunters, the harpooner from Sumatra,</span></p> <p><span>the cook from Borneo, who like my ancestors</span><span>wandered from town to port without a claim,</span><span>their names inside me though not in the registries.</span></p> <p><span>No more than geese in flight, shadowing the lawn,</span><span>cries pierc","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"294 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140116765","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":"Scenes: Soft Skull Press: An Interview with Mensah Demary","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a921805","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a921805","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 --> Scenes<span>Soft Skull Press: An Interview with Mensah Demary</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> </ul> <p><strong>Could you briefly describe your press's history?</strong></p> <p>Soft Skull Press began in New York City in 1992 as photocopied, tape-bound books. Over thirty years later, Soft Skull continues to evolve, becoming wiser and more thoughtful about the literature we publish. Though the history of the press should be remembered and protected against nostalgia, Soft Skull today is a house of diverse literary writers among a continuum of independent artists, past and future. Soft Skull has published award-winning books across genres by authors including Lynne Tillman, Rebecca Walker, Maggie Nelson, Kashana Cauley, Hiromi Kawakami, and others. Since 2021, Soft Skull has been led by Editor-in-Chief Mensah Demary, and Assistant Editor Cecilia Flores.</p> <p><strong>How would you characterize the work you publish?</strong></p> <p>Each Soft Skull title is a distinct, singular work of literature demonstrating integrity, developed through practice, and derived from the intuition of its author. Soft Skull Press exhibits mastery and genius unrestrained by genre.</p> <p><strong>Who is your audience, and in what ways are you trying to reach them?</strong></p> <p>Our audience consists of thinkers, dreamers, and artists seeking a sensory experience beyond reading who collude with our books to foster liberation through the attractive force of affinity.</p> <p>By cultivating a curatorial approach to our initiatives, events, and acquisitions, Soft Skull tries to reach its audience through interdisciplinary and creative events, partnerships and campaigns. Our collaborative editorial practices render the book neither object nor subject, exclusively, but encourages lines of articulation and flight connecting our titles, authors, concepts, and worlds to one another, fostering a cosmos within which our readers are at liberty to place themselves.</p> <p>By partnering with inventive and multimedia digital art spaces and intentional, public, cultural institutions, Soft Skull aims to provide events <strong>[End Page 171]</strong> and experiences for our authors and readers that celebrate, interrogate, participate in, and reimagine the composite parts of a book's object-to-subject relationship.</p> <p><strong>What is your role in the publishing scene?</strong></p> <p>It is vital to independent literature that we provide a home for artists who eschew corporate publishing. As editors and collaborators, we think deeply about our relationships to Soft Skull, its authors, and their titles. We are defenders of the life of the mind. We do so, in part, by pushing back against opinion for opinion's sake. We ask our authors, and ourselves, to refine their opinions into theories, across genres, faithful to a body of fact.</p> <p>Examples of this can be found ","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"38 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141149619","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":"Kid Coole by M. G. Stephens, and: King Ezra by M. G. Stephens (review)","authors":"John Schertzer","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a921783","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a921783","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>Kid Coole</em> by M. G. Stephens, and: <em>King Ezra</em> by M. G. Stephens <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> John Schertzer (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>kid coole</small></em> M. G. Stephens<br/> Spuyten Duyvil<br/> https://www.spuytenduyvil.net/kid-coole.html<br/> 280 pages; Print, $20.00 <em><small>king ezra</small></em> M. G. Stephens<br/> Spuyten Duyvil<br/> https://www.spuytenduyvil.net/king-ezra.html<br/> 314 pages; Print, $20.00 <p>Poet, novelist, critic, memoirist, and playwright, Michael Gregory Stephens has written over twenty-five books in just over fifty years. He grew up in Brooklyn and on Long Island, and after teaching at Princeton, NYU, and Columbia he spent a number of years in London, where his plays were performed, as they were as well as in Chicago and Los Angeles. His novels <em>Kid Coole</em> and <em>King Ezra</em> were recently published by Spuyten Duyvil.</p> <p>Kid Coole is cool, meaning you can trust him with your fifteen-year-old daughter. Ya think, though you have your suspicions. He doesn't drink, smoke, or stay out late at night, and he might prefer you, her thirty-year-old mom, who thinks she wants nothing to do with him. Nah, Kid is living the straight and narrow, though he at times cannot find his way back to his corner, maybe because he is punch drunk, or has blood in his eye.</p> <p>His story is a boxing story, and that's because boxing is his way of being, of navigating his way through life. But his trainer, Bill Flaherty, or Billy Farts, still needs to hire the massive Ralph Half-Dog as the third corner guy, the spit guy, because he's something you can't miss, and Kid does seem to have a bit of trouble finding his way back to his corner after taking a few punches. <strong>[End Page 67]</strong></p> <p>Ralph is Mike White's son-in-law, and Mike works for Billy. Mike's face is pretty scarred up, as is his body, from fights, but also from things unrelated to the ring, living on the street as a man of color, getting stabbed, shot at. He's much safer in the gym. But his biggest scar is the one he has on his chest down to his gut from heart surgery, a thing he shares with Billy.</p> <p>Compared to them, Kid is young and fresh. And always cool. A likable guy, always respectful, very coachable, works out all the time, running this way and that through the streets of some small town called Sticks in Upstate New York, throwing punches at the wind, at no one, as he skitters to and fro when he's not at his job cleaning up the park or mopping floors at the Catholic school.</p> <p>The characters of <em>Kid Coole</em> are embodied with a credible grit, a novel that follows from Stephens's much earlier <em>Season at Coole</em> (1972) and <em>The Brooklyn Book of the Dead</em> (1994), about a large, problematic, and freakish Irish American family from Brooklyn, Long Island, and ","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"47 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141149616","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}