Month: August 2021

on In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale

By Patrick Pittman
From the Fall 2021 Issue

“Because twentieth-century history spread its cataclysms liberally around the globe, most people alive can consider themselves survivors to some extent,” writes the Russian poet and essayist Maria Stepanova in In Memory of Memory, originally published in 2017 and presented by …

Patrick Pittman

Patrick Pittman is a writer and editor who has reported from many remote corners of the planet for print, radio, online, and film. He was previously the editor of the Montreal-based magazine The Alpine Review and the Australian magazine Dumbo Feather. His debut theater work, Prompter, was staged in Melbourne in 2013. He is currently based in Toronto.

on Of Course by Catherine Wagner

By Jacqueline Kari
From the Fall 2021 Issue

How does one survive in the current climate, political and ecological? “Live in the world and hurt / the living lining, that’s how,” Catherine Wagner proposes in her recent book Of Course. Wagner stages interrogations of the self both …

Jacqueline Kari is a doctoral candidate in contemporary American poetry and international Modernism at the University of Georgia. She is the author of several chapbooks of poetry and translations and is the creator of theannotatedsongs.com, an ongoing annotation of the Modernist poet Mina Loy’s “Songs to Joannes” funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her creative work has appeared in Chicago Review; Cambridge Literary Review; Lana Turner; Action, Yes; and elsewhere. 

on The Silence by Don DeLillo

By Felice Arenas
From the Fall 2021 Issue

When every screen in the world goes vvvzzztt and then blank, “What happens to people who live inside their phones?” Such is the question the world’s resident doyen of hysterical realism and American mythology, Don DeLillo, poses and answers in …

Felice Arenas

Felice Arenas wrote Netflix synopses for a decade and covered cinema and music for HuffPost before earning her MFA from New York University, where she taught creative writing and was a Global Research Initiatives Fellow. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Harvard Review, Entropy, High Shelf Press, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Chicago, she has lived in Los Angeles, New York, Brooklyn, and Shanghai.

Silk Poetics (on Jen Bervin’s Silk Poems and Aditi Machado’s Emporium and The End)

By Toby Altman
From the Fall 2021 Issue

“I came along a silk route,” Aditi Machado announces in the first line of the first poem in her new book, Emporium. The statement contains a careful imprecision: Machado substitutes the expected “road” for a near, but disorienting synonym, …

Toby Altman

Toby Altman is the author of Discipline Park (Wendy’s Subway, 2022) and Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017). He recently received a 2021–22 fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems can be found in Gulf Coast, jubilat, Lana Turner, and elsewhere, and his critical writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, and English Literary History, among other journals. He holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD in English from Northwestern University.

A Celebration of Life (with an interview by C. J. Bartunek)

By Derek Fordjour
From the Fall 2021 Issue

INTRODUCTION

For Derek Fordjour, creating art is not only an act of individual expression, but also a catalyst for building community and transforming lives. A painter, sculptor, and installation artist whose work has been embraced by some of the most …

Derek Fordjour

Derek Fordjour’s artwork has been exhibited in venues including Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Nasher Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and appears in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Studio Museum of Harlem, the Whitney Museum, LACMA, and elsewhere. In 2018 he was commissioned to create a permanent installation for the Metropolitan Transit Authority of New York City at 145th Street Subway Station. A graduate of Morehouse College, Fordjour also earned a master’s degree in art education from Harvard University and an MFA in painting from Hunter College. He is the Alex Katz Chair at Cooper Union and serves as a Core Critic at Yale University School of Art.

R U ok?! (8/3/2019); Industrial Sign Language (You at the Textile Museum); You & Louise Bourgeois’s The Fragile; & You Were an Asshole

By Rosa Alcalá
From the Fall 2021 Issue
…

Rosa Alcalá is the author of three books of poetry, most recently MyOTHER TONGUE (Futurepoem, 2017). Her poems appear in numerous anthologies and journals, including Best American Poetry, American Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement, The Nation, and The American Poetry Review. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship and runner-up for a PEN Translation Award, she is the editor and co-translator of New & Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña (Kelsey Street Press, 2018) and a professor of creative writing at the University of Texas at El Paso, where she teaches in its Bilingual MFA Program.

Anegada

By Charles Rzepka
From the Fall 2021 Issue
…

Charles Rzepka was born in Detroit, did his graduate work at University of California–Berkeley, and now lives in the Boston area. He teaches English at Boston University and, in addition to poetry, writes books and essays on British Romanticism and on crime fiction. His latest book is Being Cool: The Work of Elmore Leonard (Johns Hopkins, 2013), and his latest essay, forthcoming in a Festschrift honoring the late Jack Stillinger, is on John Keats’s “Isabella, or The Pot of Basil.” 

The Shofar; Suffering; & Where Is the Master, Boatswain

By G. C. Waldrep
From the Fall 2021 Issue
…

G. C. Waldrep’s most recent books are The Earliest Witnesses (Tupelo/Carcanet, 2021) and feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he teaches at Bucknell University. In 2021, he was a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.

Auden in America

By Edward Brash
From the Fall 2021 Issue
…

Edward Brash was born in Pittsburgh, grew up in Philadelphia, attended Williams College, and earned his living as an editor at Time-Life Books. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Partisan Review, The Atlantic, The American Scholar, Mademoiselle, Critical Quarterly, and other magazines and anthologies in the United States and the U.K.