For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] The U.S. release of Vertigo & Ghost—already the winner of the 2019 Forward and Roehampton Prizes in the United Kingdom—should gain Fiona Benson a much-deserved wider audience. Her poetry is in turn thrilling, dizzying, devastating, lyrical, distinctive, and this is a bombshell of a collection. The first section uses classical mythology as a structural … Read more
[ad_1] Do you know who Andrew Haswell Green was? I’m ashamed to say that prior to reading Jonathan Lee’s phenomenal The Great Mistake, I didn’t know much about the “Father of Greater New York,” even though I’ve benefited from the public spaces that he had an enormous hand in creating. I walk through Central Park … Read more
[ad_1] I first read Natalia Ginzburg’s memoir Lessico Famigliare—Family Lexicon—for a college Italian class. Though that book is in a language I no longer understand as fluidly as I wish I could, it has accompanied me across all my moves since. This re-issue of Voices in the Evening, also translated by D.M. Low and recently … Read more
[ad_1] Creating a fresh playlist of such a critical voice in modern American poetry is both a significant challenge for the editors and a satisfying reward for us. The Essential June Jordan, edited by Jan Heller Levi and Christoph Keller, is a generous collection which samples poems—some unpublished—across decades, making one distinctly aware of how … Read more
[ad_1] T.S. Eliot aside, April, with its changeable weather and motion, seems a peculiar month to designate for all things poetry. Yet, as one of the most contrary months of the calendar, it’s perfect: poetry is the country of flexible words and contexts and sometimes startling shifts in a single stanza, the way you need … Read more
[ad_1] A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, features Hanif Abdurraqib’s considerable talents as a poet, essayist and thoughtful social commentator. Reading this book reminded me of listening to the late-night DJs of my youth—I especially remember Alison Steele, the Nightbird—who used songs as the starting point to improvise a jazz … Read more
[ad_1] It’s been five years since Cortney Lamar Charleston’s debut, and Doppelgangbanger is more than worth the wait: it’s a kaleidoscope of a collection effortlessly combining cultural signposts with philosophical ruminations about identity, place and self-determination. Charleston explores the ways that spirit and body can be restricted, harmed, and too often obliterated in our society … Read more
[ad_1] One of the enduring pleasures of poetry is how like wine, or friendship, it improves as it—and you—age. Re-read the 2019s or the 2000s, or the 1966’s to savor the context of our past, through your present vantage point. Other than live theatre, there is no other medium such as poetry so well-situated for … Read more
[ad_1] In the forward to Black Futures—this eclectic anthology of Black imagination and achievement—co-editors Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham share its central question: “What does it mean to be Black and alive right now?” Of course, that “right now” is necessarily a misnomer, because the world has changed, is changing, from the time this project … Read more
[ad_1] Nikki Giovanni—one of the great poets of any generation—still has much to impart in Make Me Rain, her hybrid autobiography of poems and prose. Given the tumultuous aspects of 2020, the disruptions and dislocations of quotidian and public life, there’s a refreshing discordance in reading Giovanni’s newest and especially personal collection. Throughout the book, … Read more