Kwame Alexander, a celebrated writer of books for young adults, presents a sweet and raw account of his path to adulthood in “Why Fathers Cry at NightKwame Alexander, a celebrated writer of books for young adults, presents a sweet and raw account of his path to adulthood in “Why Fathers Cry at Night.”
“This is not a traditional memoir,” he confesses at the opening. “These are just snapshots of a man learning to love.” But it’s more than that — and more artful, too. Interspersed between family recipes and a number of his moving poems, Alexander describes his demanding father, his own two failed marriages and his challenges with his daughters.
He also traces the surprising route of his literary success, which began by self-publishing more than a dozen books.
Among the memoir’s many treasures is a funny section about his long-running feud with the poet Nikki Giovanni, who knew nothing about his acrimony until after it faded into friendship....more
Maggie Millner’s debut collection, “Couplets,” has a red hot cover, but the poems inside are even hotter. A love story in verse and prose, “Couplets” Maggie Millner’s debut collection, “Couplets,” has a red hot cover, but the poems inside are even hotter. A love story in verse and prose, “Couplets” is already attracting a swell of critical and popular attention. Our reviewer, Kristen Millares Young, writes, "Restless, imaginative and daring, ‘Couplets’ advances the canon of the erotic."
The poems — constructed from endlessly clever rhyming couplets — describe a young woman’s uneasy shift from loving a man to loving a woman for the first time.
In a moment of introspection, she says, “I saw a person who kissed mostly men, / wrote poems in the prevailing style, owned a cat. / I saw a different person after that.”
I saw a different poetry after that: entirely accessible but challenging, formally inventive but coherent, thematically radical but never dogmatic. You can sense Millner fracturing rhymes and meters to create lines as iconoclastic as the sexual framework her speaker is struggling to discover. “Couplets” is witty, erotic and disarmingly candid about the mercurial nature of desire and identity. ...more
On Jan. 16, 2023, “Sonnets for Albert,” by Anthony Joseph, won the T.S. Eliot Prize. The annual award, worth about $31,000, honors the best poetry colOn Jan. 16, 2023, “Sonnets for Albert,” by Anthony Joseph, won the T.S. Eliot Prize. The annual award, worth about $31,000, honors the best poetry collection published in the U.K and Ireland.
Joseph, who was born in Trinidad and moved to Britain in the late 1980s, is a musician, writer and teacher at King’s College London.
“Sonnets for Albert” is a frank, heartbreaking reflection on the poet’s late father.
“My father wasn’t great as a dad, but I loved him, was fascinated by him,” Joseph said in an interview with the T.S. Eliot Foundation. “At its heart the book is really about loss and love. I think love is the main theme – the capacity to love, the way we can love unconditionally where a person’s humanity, their substance, is so strong it displaces their questionable aspects.” (Video: Joseph talks about his work.)
Regrettably, Joseph’s books – five poetry collections and three novels – are not published in the United States, but copies can be ordered from abroad. (Copper Canyon, Graywolf, Tin House: Won’t someone bring “Sonnets for Albert” to America?) ...more
This winter, by some felicitous coincidence, the Wheel of Fortune has delivered two delightful books about Alison from Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." OThis winter, by some felicitous coincidence, the Wheel of Fortune has delivered two delightful books about Alison from Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." One, “The Wife of Willesden,” is an exuberant, modern-day play by the novelist Zadie Smith. The other, “The Wife of Bath,” is an illuminating analysis by Oxford University professor Marion Turner, who published a critically acclaimed biography of Chaucer in 2019.
Smith had no intention of writing for the theater, but a coincidence of misunderstandings left her committed, and in the end, she says, she found the process of transferring Chaucer’s most famous character to modern-day northwest London “one of the more delightful writing experiences of my life.”
That joy now redounds to us in this book, which contains Smith’s charming introduction, her script from the sold-out production playing in London, and the full text of Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” and “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.”
Smith anticipates purists’ objections. “It must seem, to many, an odd partnership,” she admits. When she started working, she felt the same way. The distance between Canterbury and her Kilburn neighborhood looked as epic as the distance between the 14th century and the 21st. But quickly, she writes, the time fell away, and the Wife of Bath felt “absolutely contemporary.”
This winter, by some felicitous coincidence, the Wheel of Fortune has delivered two delightful books about Alison from Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." OThis winter, by some felicitous coincidence, the Wheel of Fortune has delivered two delightful books about Alison from Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." One, “The Wife of Willesden,” is an exuberant, modern-day play by the novelist Zadie Smith. The other, “The Wife of Bath,” is an illuminating analysis by Oxford University professor Marion Turner, who published a critically acclaimed biography of Chaucer in 2019.
Turner’s immensely entertaining “biography” will make you fall in love with the Wife of Bath, whom she crowns “the first ordinary woman in English literature.”
And that’s no put-down. By “ordinary,” Turner means “the first mercantile, working, sexually active woman — not a virginal princess or queen, not a nun, witch, or sorceress, not a damsel in distress nor a functional servant character, not an allegory.” No, here in this poem from the year 1400, we discover “a much-married woman and widow, who works in the cloth trade and tells us about her friends, her tricks, her experience of domestic abuse, her long career combating misogyny, her reflections on the ageing process, and her enjoyment of sex.”
Turner’s greatest skill is her ability to present years of arcane research in chapters that are always wonderfully accessible and briskly entertaining. . . .
The poet Carl Phillips has just published a small collection of illuminating, deeply endearing essays about the writing life called “My Trade Is MysteThe poet Carl Phillips has just published a small collection of illuminating, deeply endearing essays about the writing life called “My Trade Is Mystery.” It's the perfect gift for any thoughtful writer, beginning or advanced.
In an essay on the role of practice, for instance, he considers the value of making mistakes: “Useful mistakes get the words on the page — footprints, as it were, as the mind staggers forward.”
This week, Joelle Taylor won the T.S. Eliot Prize for her fourth collection, “C+nto & Othered Poems.” The annual poetry award, worth about $34,000, reThis week, Joelle Taylor won the T.S. Eliot Prize for her fourth collection, “C+nto & Othered Poems.” The annual poetry award, worth about $34,000, recognizes the best new collection published in the U.K. and Ireland.
The T.S. Eliot judges praised “C+nto” as “a blazing book of rage and light, a grand opera of liberation from the shadows of indifference and oppression.”
In her preface, Taylor writes, “While this book is set in what is now thought of as the ‘golden age of the gay,’ we have regressed as a community. Our meeting places, clubs and bars have closed, and we gather in distinct flocks across social media, each flock speaking a different language. We inhabit separate rooms in the same club. If we were to regain the real-life meeting grounds, if we were to be in the same room, then perhaps we would remember our commonality.”...more
More than three decades after Chinese soldiers killed hundreds — possibly thousands — of student protesters, the Communist Party is still sniffing outMore than three decades after Chinese soldiers killed hundreds — possibly thousands — of student protesters, the Communist Party is still sniffing out even the faintest references to the Tiananmen Square massacre.
But Sheng Keyi made it easy for government censors to find her. Her novel “Death Fugue” opens in the capital city of Beiping on the very day a nine-story tower of poo appears in Round Square.
The story that follows is a kind of Chaucerian refraction of the vicious military assault that shocked the world in 1989. Alerted to the appearance of a pile of crap, thousands of people rush to the square. Some wonder “what sort of sphincter would have been capable of forming such a masterpiece.” Others hope to exploit the excitement to push for political reform. Official media outlets advise calm, “advancing the theory that the tower was made of gorilla excrement,” but competing theories spread fast, drawing ever more protesters waving placards such as “Live in Truth” and “DNA Testing for Stool Samples.” Finally, in a violent overreaction, the government flushes the trouble away, leaving the square so perfectly restored that no evidence of resistance remains.
From that mound of scatological humor emerges a pungent political satire that has, predictably, been banned in China. . . .
Diane Seuss brings to her poetry a combination of tenderness and rawness that’s utterly disarming. Smart and rude and witty and heartbreaking, she turDiane Seuss brings to her poetry a combination of tenderness and rawness that’s utterly disarming. Smart and rude and witty and heartbreaking, she turns away from nothing -- except dishonestly; that she will not abide. I interviewed her two years ago for “Life of a Poet,” sponsored by the Library of Congress, and found her incredibly illuminating, particularly on the process of translating painful experience into art (watch). Her new collection of 42 untitled sonnets, “frank,” may be her best book yet. It’s scarily good. In the following poem, Seuss remembers Mikel Lindzy, a friend she met in high school art class and later lost to AIDS. He’s pictured on the book’s cover. ...more
“Dead Souls,” by the English writer Sam Riviere, is hard to stop reading because it’s written as a single paragraph almost 300 pages long. Never in my“Dead Souls,” by the English writer Sam Riviere, is hard to stop reading because it’s written as a single paragraph almost 300 pages long. Never in my life have I so missed the little periodic indentations of ordinary prose. It felt like wandering around the mall for six days looking for a place to sit down.
But the structure is not the most daunting aspect of Riviere’s novel. There’s also the matter of its subject: “Dead Souls” is an exceedingly cerebral comedy about the viability of contemporary poetry. One of the book’s blurbs claims it’s “gut-wrenchingly funny,” which may be true for a certain subset of lute-playing spoken-word baristas in Brooklyn, but others should temper their expectations.
This is not a negative review.
Indeed, I think “Dead Souls” is one of the wittiest, sharpest, cruelest critiques of literary culture I’ve ever read. Riviere unleashes a flock of winged devils to tear apart the hermetically sealed world of privilege, praise and publication in which a few lucky writers dwell. . . .
Loading...
