Standing Still in a Concrete Jungle, by Justin Nobel. Zoom Books, 2012. $12.00, 105 pages.
Justin Nobel’s autobiographical psycho-geography of New York is at turns disciplined and whimsical, insightful and playful. Structured around eleven site-specific observations or reflections, the …
In winter you strapped the canoe
to the basement ceiling,
every rib written in silt.
Every year the huge lake froze,
ice figures clawed
and covered the pier.
Even in summer we shivered with cold,
my two brothers and I,…
Like any historical novel—even one set in recent history—Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers is a convergence of the past and the present, the time before now rendered with the help of research but intrinsically influenced …
Everyone agreed, the dead robot was making them sad. It lay across the front steps of the Wang family’s house, bucket-shaped head tilted to the side, three arms and three legs sprawled in every direction. Mr. and Mrs. Wang had …
All Decent Animals, by Oonya Kempadoo. FSG, 2013. $26, 272 pages.
During Carnival in Port of Spain, with loud Mama look a boo-boo tin pan, rum in everyone, close friends throw answers back and forth to the question: Where …
Speech Begins after Death, by Michel Foucault (in conversation with Claude Bonnefoy). Ed. Philippe Artières. Trans. Robert Bononno. University of Minnesota Press, 2013. $24.95, 96 pages.
In this small, short, and entirely arresting book, the reader gets a brief …
Murder Ballad, by Jane Springer. Alice James Books, 2012. $15.95, 80 pages.
Billie Holiday presides over Jane Springer’s Murder Ballad, winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award. It’s not the public radio cliché of the flower-wearing chanteuse that shadows …
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MILTON, BLIND and useless, visited the office of employment in Malebolge. He’d had it with paradise, this sitting around doing nothing to the tunes of Petrarch. There is no devil as we’ve come to think. In the offices and offices |
Two hundred frames in, you decide the sketches
are too shaky once set in motion. You throw them
in the garbage, dump your spaghetti on top so
there would be no way to salvage them. This repeats
again, except the …
1.
Belief in story is a belief
in travel or trouble—
a newborn becoming
unmoved by his conscience,
a vocabulary collecting
2.
reason by slow degrees.
Suppose it’s not fear
but how we spend our …
Athanasius Kircher, a seventeenth-century German Jesuit and self-styled “master of a hundred arts,” is credited with inventing the megaphone, a pre-cursor to the computer, and (perhaps) a cat piano. His intense curiosity about the …