The Look2 essay series, which replaces our print book reviews, takes a closer look at the careers of accomplished authors who have yet to receive the full appreciation that their work deserves. Reviews of new books can still be found on our blog at pshares.org. The small tasks of daily life may sometimes be…
Wayne Miller’s third and forth poetry collections are The City, Our City (Milkweed, 2011)—which was a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award and the Rilke Prize—and Post- (2016; forthcoming). His translation of Moikom Zeqo’sZodiac will be published by Zephyr Press in 2015, and he has coedited three books, including the forthcoming Literary Publishing in the 21st Century (Milkweed, 2015)….
My mother started writing essays in English, essays with wrong punctuation, wrong tenses, wrong spacing wrong spelling, with Arabic terms too, typed in English (and a French accent) when she cannot find the translation for…mina. In her e-mail she tells me she’s very “exited” about this— her American teacher loves her ideas, even in her…
Creation is often imagined as inherently isolated and intimate: a Walden Pond-esque activity improved by seclusion and destroyed by wifi, phone calls, and . . . well, friends. So I’ve been thrilled this month to see a few books being celebrated for challenging the Lone Genius Myth: Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators, Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Powers of Two, and Stephen Johnson’s How…
In memory of Chinua Achebe 1930-2013 Aupres de toi j’ai retrouvé mon nom. —David Diop I. The first time I read The Portrait of a Lady I was twenty-three and had been married for less than a year. We had been living for only a few months in Nigeria, a country that had become independent…
In the months after my friend R.’s death, I suffered bouts of shame deeper than any I’d experienced before. These were often followed by unreasonable fits of anger, which had me shaking my fist at drivers when I was walking and shouting at pedestrians when I was driving. At least I considered them unreasonable at…
Say what you will about the patient in twelve: to me he was not an exceptional case. None of them were. Strictly speaking it is never the dying who are exceptional, for the dead will always outnumber the living. It is we who are the imperiled minority—we who plod on alone in the shadow of…
Adam Zagajewski’s newest collection of poems touches on many of the motifs and themes that his poetry is known for. The book is divided into three parts, very carefully arranged, almost like a musical composition. Certain subjects introduced in the first section reappear later in several variations, like Joseph Street in the Krakow Jewish quarter,…
Marilyn Hacker, translation of Birds and Bison, poems by Claire Malroux: These are both urban and pastoral poems, marvelously observing the natural world, language, and the human spirit. (Sheep Meadow)
Winter 2006-07 - Digital