“The language with which you will tell the story of your times”

Dorfman’s Feeding on Dreams provides a timely look at dictatorship, language and memory

The thrust of Ariel Dorfman’s newest work Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile is instinctual. In it, he sets out to do what every mortal would, given the chance: tell his or her own story, in his or her own terms. READ MORE

Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile A Memoir by Ariel Dorfman Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011 352 pages Reviewed by Erin Becker

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,” says Humbert Humbert, the pedophiliac protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. And murderers aren’t the only ones. Authors ranging from the Marquis de Sade to Edgar Allen Poe to Chuck Palahnuik have relied on similar tricks, juxtaposing the abhorrent behavior of their characters with irresistibly lovely language, daring the reader to fall under the poetic spell and into the seductive consciousness of every variety of sadist, fetishist and psychopath. READ MORE

The Necrophiliac A Novel by Gabrielle Wittkop Translated from the French by Don Bapst ECW Press , 2011 (first published 1972) 91 pages Reviewed by Ali Shapiro

Jakob Arjouni has been hailed – mainly in Germany – as the successor to American crime fiction masters Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man) and Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye) since the release of his first novel, Happy Birthday, Turk! in 1987. Arjouni picks up the tradition of “hardboiled” private eye crime fiction Hammett and Chandler made popular in the 1920s and1930s, respectively, creating a dark, seedy world and an unorthodox private detective whose morals and actions may be as suspect as the criminals he pursues for money. READ MORE

Happy Birthday, Turk! A novel by Jakob Arjouni Translated from the German by Anselm Hollo Melville House, 2011 (first published 1987) 176 pages Reviewed by SD Alison

In 1884, Paul Verlaine published his ground-breaking essay and anthology, “Les Poètes maudits.” The three original “damned” poets were Tristan Corbière, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé. Perhaps the most famous nineteenth-century French poet after Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire, Rimbaud has been translated frequently and well (most recently in an edition of Illuminations by John Ashbery) and attracted the notice not only of poets but of pop singers, too (Jim Morrison and Patti Smith have numbered among his admirers). Mallarmé, more hermetic, rarified, and often difficult to translate, remains a recognizable figure—an exemplar of both “pure poetry” and typographical experimentation. In spite of his acclaim by various American modernists, Corbière has never achieved the same appeal. T.S. Eliot listed him among those poets without whom he could not have written, and in 1920, Ezra Pound called him “the greatest poet of the period.” Nonetheless, he has remained primarily, like Jules Laforgue, a reference point for American modernism, a peculiar taste from a peculiar age rather than required reading. READ MORE

Poet by Default Poetry by Tristan Corbière Translated by Noelle Kocot Wave Books, 2011 22 pages Reviewed by Justin Sider

The Roman poet-philosopher’s basic premise in The Order of Things, one he takes pains to derive from Epicurus and to distinguish from the claims of other pre-Socratics, is that the world is made of infinite space and of loosely moving tiny atoms that alternately bunch together and fly apart. There is no purpose to their motion beyond mere accident. No purpose—most emphatically, no anthropocentric purpose—is also inherent in the increasingly complex living things these atoms sometimes cluster into. READ MORE

De Rerum Natura – The Nature of Things A philosophical poem by Lucretius Translated from the Latin by David R. Slavitt University of California Press, 2008 320 pages Reviewed by Marta Figlerowicz

“Opera,” writes Herbert Lindenberger, “is the last remaining refuge of the high style,” while movies, according to Stanley Cavell, arise “from below the world.” Somewhere in the mix of high and low, old and new, epic and profane, elite and populist, and technological and pre-technological, Marcia Citron finds the subject of When Opera Meets Film, the latest of a recent flourishing of academic books that break ground on a substantial topic and a fascinating repertory. While opera scholarship has been around for centuries, and film scholarship is as old as the medium itself, only recently have academics (generally musicologists, though the philosopher Stanley Cavell is a commanding presence) tackled the peculiar courtship of two art forms that seem, on the surface, to stand at odds. How to reconcile movies, the exemplary twentieth-century art, with opera, whose grandiloquence and earnestness in the face of absurdity recall an earlier epoch? And how to relate opera’s distant faces and resonant voices to film’s whispered close-up? READ MORE

When Opera Meets Film by Marcia J. Citron Cambridge University Press, 2011 324 pages Reviewed by Dan Wang

“I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America,” wrote Charles Olson at the beginning of Call Me Ishmael, his mythopoetic account of Melville’s Moby Dick. And Wallace Stevens, in “The American Sublime,” argued that in this country the sublime comes down to “the empty spirit / in vacant space.” In their accounts of American “space,” both poets were situating themselves within the native tradition of Romanticism associated with Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville and Hawthorne. Their interpretations of the American nineteenth-century have fed a small but vital poetic tradition, in which we might include, among others, Ed Dorn, Jack Spicer, Susan Howe, and Peter Gizzi. READ MORE

Circle’s Apprentice Poetry by Dan Beachy-Quick Tupelo Press, 2011 90 pages Review by Justin Sider

Robert Duncan’s heresies are innumerable. Often overlooked in his poetry as the pardonable consequence of a theosophical upbringing, the publication of his massive scholarly appreciation of Hilda Doolittle throws light on the depth and extent to which the poet was committed to religious dissent and poetic nonconformity. Even those who have long appreciated Duncan’s poetry might be surprised to learn what this work shows him to have actually believed about his own art. READ MORE

The H.D. Book A work of poetry criticism by Robert Duncan, edited by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman University of California Press, 2011 678 pages New Selected Poems and Translations A collection of poetry by Ezra Pound, edited by Richard Sieburth New Directions Publishing, 2010 391 pages Review by Edgar Garcia

The second quarter of The Wide Road, Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian’s strange, charming, picaresque “novel,” consists of epistolary correspondence between the book’s authors. These letters comment on the work we are reading, even as they evoke an enviably intelligent creative partnership. “We seem,” writes Hejinian to Harryman, “to be particularly given to unlikely linkages, to exciting mismatches, to the creative (playful, powerful, funny, mournful) co-existence of live incommensurabilities.” This is as good a gloss on a prominent tendency within the Language poetry movement generally (of which Hejinian and Harryman are founding members) as it is on The Wide Road itself. The Wide Road locates in the genres of travel-writing and of the picaresque happily fertile ground for such “live incommensurabilities”: “There is no analogous flattened happiness to that of curious and receptive travelers. Indeed, the morning bowed informally to us from the wide road which was filled with things to be coupled and compared.” READ MORE

The Wide Road By Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian Belladonna, 2011 92 pages Review by Len Gutkin

Reviewing Rae Armantrout’s work after her last book, Versed (2009), won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award is a decidedly different affair than it might have been, say, four or five years ago. Not that anything has changed radically in her style or content. Her poems are still terse, elliptical fragments. They still interrogate identity, voice, language, politics, sex, media, capital. At their best they still buzz like Emily Dickinson’s fly between us and the light of our casual assumptions. Reviewing Armantrout’s new work is different now because those awards and the reviews that followed make her the most recent in a line of experimental poets to find her work applauded and more widely circulated by the center, aesthetically speaking, of the poetry community, and, as such, she has also become a cipher for the shifting terrain of contemporary verse. One is obliged to comment. READ MORE

Money Shot Poetry by Rae Armantrout Wesleyan University Press, 2011 92 pages Reviewed by Justin Sider

Neela Vaswani’s second book, You Have Given Me A Country, is a collage of memoir, history, and fiction which investigates the already complex and problematic nature of defining nationality. Thematically linked to other authors such as James McBride and Mira Kamdar, Vaswani’s Country weaves readers in and out of several different cultures, seeking an understanding of what it means to be a citizen of anywhere. READ MORE

You Have Given Me A Country A memoir by Neela Vaswani Sarabande Books, 2010 256 pages Reviewed by Patrick Haas

Stephen Lapthisophon’s Writing Art Cinema 1988-2010 courageously and vigorously joins the project—begun in the twentieth century with Dada and Surrealism, and continued in the cultural criticism of Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord—of finding words and images to grapple with, and shift our perspective on our current corporate existence, (i.e. Global Society, Inc). I want to say emphatically NOT culture; the layers of experience reflected here have too little coherence, grounding, or meaning to be either “culture” or “ideology.” READ MORE

Writing Art Cinema 1988-2010 A collection of essays by Stephen Lapthisophon Green Lantern Press, 2011 103 pages Reviewed by Barbara E. Ladner

The phrase “country of the pointed firs” is used only once in this meticulous, beautiful little novella: towards its end, in the chapter entitled “The Feast’s End.” The scene is the Bowden family wedding, the biggest event of the year for the inhabitants of Dunnett Landing, a sparsely populated, decaying fishing village in turn of the 20th century Maine. Our narrator, a woman returned to Dunnett Landing “after a brief visit made two or three summers before,” is attending the wedding with friends. Overwhelmed at the intensity of the occasion, her thoughts retreat from the scene around her – as they so often do – into generalized observations of nature and life. As the wedding is wrapping up, she contemplates the social bonds of that place, the different ways adults and children there have of responding to one another. Mostly, her thoughts are of the “elder kinsfolk,” with their “affectionate meetings and… reluctant partings. ” To the young our narrator barely gives any thought at all, noting only that, for them, “the time of separation has not come.” READ MORE

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The Country of the Pointed Firs A novella by Sarah Orne Jewett Melville House, 2010 (first published in 1896) 158 pages Reviewed by Mark Molloy

Quintessence is two ambitious projects in one: on the one hand, it’s a specialized survey of “minor” poetry from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and on the other hand, it’s a loose exploration of the relationship between “minor” and “major” poets. I should immediately de-emphasize the term “Symbolism” here; Caples himself admits his use of the term “merely for convenience” “to designate a broad poetic tendency,” which he describes as “the beginning, however tentative, of modernism.” Readers looking for a discussion on English Symbolism, whatever that may be, are advised to look elsewhere; Caples’s discussion is loose and tentative and mostly in the service of other purposes. READ MORE

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Quintessence of the Minor: Symbolist Poetry in English A Work of Literary Criticism by Garrett Caples Wave Books, Pamphlet Series, 2010 42 pages Reviewed by Zebadiah Taylor

Mercury made the proverbial hatter mad. The philosopher who aims to pin down music might suffer the same fate—like quicksilver it seems to slip one’s grasp. Best give away what, in any case, will fly. The composer does so with her notation; a score that in turn might give way to divergent performances. And if one of these is called definitive, it is not any less transient by virtue of that attribution. If, finally, music rests in the auditory memory of the listener, it is more a hostel than a home, with recent hearings mixing with old ear worms, and thoughts wandering to all the competing demands on time. Where, then, in these tenuously associated domains is music? And then, of course, there is the issue of recording. READ MORE

Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction A Work of Music Criticism by Arved Ashby University of California Press, 2010 336 pages Reviewed by John Granzow

This review first appeared in MAKE 10.

Dear Apocalypse, K. A. Hays’s first published book, stands firmly in the Romantic tradition: observations of nature, spoken in an elevated diction, are plumbed and drawn into expansive cosmic ruminations on life and death.

The Smaller Half—also a first book— is a brief collection of short poems. Some are perceptive, heartfelt, and sincere; a few are mischievously surreal and enchanting; many are errant and inaccessible. A labored work, highly crafted and full of great deliberateness, The Smaller Half is also an awkward one, at times defiantly inarticulate. READ MORE

Dear Apocalypse A collection of poems by K. A. Hays Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2009 82 pages Reviewed by Mark Molloy The Smaller Half A collection of poems by Marc Rahe Rescue Press, 2010 72 pages Reviewed by Mark Molloy

This review first appeared in MAKE 10.

Joe Meno’s brain is a big dark attic full of chests built in sad cities and salvaged from the bellies of vessels from the past and future, from this planet and others. His work is known for its conflation of the absurd with the everyday but also for its simple, authentic dialogue and its intense empathy for its characters. His seventh book and second collection of short fiction, Demons in the Spring, finds him further cultivating these stylistic gardens. READ MORE

Demons in the Spring A collection of short stories by Joe Meno Akashic Books Hardcover first published 2008; paperback published 2010 280 pages Review by SD Allison

This review first appeared in MAKE 10.

Bringing together poems from Cole’s six previously published books of poetry, Pierce the Skin charts this painstaking labor across several decades. Aparthood in all its forms is Cole’s constant theme, and this collection shows Cole working it with increasing honesty and depth, gradually finding the music that allows him to say the unsayable more fully and provocatively. Likewise, as Pierce the Skin unfolds, Cole’s prosody seems to discover its native rhythms, shedding the elaborate and sometimes strained arrangements of the earlier poems and moving toward a spareness in which the relations between sound and sense grow ever stranger and more luminous. READ MORE

Pierce the Skin: Selected Poems A collection of poems by Henri Cole Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010 160 pages Reviewed by Amelia Klein

This review first appeared in MAKE 10.

The aim of Microscripts, a recent translation of selected of Walser’s minor writings, is to bring out the material aspects of this nervousness, in texts where it takes what might be its most extreme form. The volume collects twenty-five short sketches Walser penciled in microscopic script on loose strips of paper: business cards, envelopes, duodecimo pulp fiction covers. Carefully chosen and lovingly presented, Microscripts is a moving introduction to Walser’s work at its most miniature, and most beautiful. READ MORE

Microscripts A collection of miniature prose pieces by Robert Walser Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky New Directions First published in the 1970s; Translation published 2010. 160 Pages Reviewed by Marta Figlerowicz

This review first appeared in MAKE 10.

How to describe Djuna Barnes’s utterly sui generis 1928 comic novel Ryder? It is, to begin with, a family history, covering four generations of the hilariously troubled Ryder clan. Particularly emphasized is Wendell Ryder (modeled on Barnes’s father, Wald Barnes), a procreation-obsessed narcissist whose troubled relationships with his two wives, Amelia and Kate, and their eight children constitute much of the book’s action. READ MORE

Ryder A novel by Djuna Barnes Afterword by Paul West Dalkey Archive Press First published in 1928; republished 2010 240 pages Reviewed by Len Gutkin