Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel (Rochester, NY: Open Letter, 2015) The unnamed narrator of Georgi Gospodinov’s inventive, ambitious novel The Physics of Sorrow suffers from “pathological empathy or obsessive empathetic-somatic syndrome,” most acutely in his childhood. “Over the years … Continued
(Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2015) Parneshia Jones’s poetry collection Vessel celebrates life with story and with lyric. Jones grew up an African-American girl in Chicago, and these reflective poems carve out for the reader a portrait of a life and … Continued
Translated from Russian by Carol Ueland and Robert Carnevale (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015) In 1989, I was a sophomore at a small Midwestern college. My friends and roommates were largely apolitical and, if I am going to … Continued
(New York, NY: Persea, 2011) One blistery spring evening last year, I wandered into the Free Library of Philadelphia for a poetry reading. It was Monday. I sat between a throng of grad students and a pair of office workers, attempting to … Continued
(Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2015) Harnessing the power of observation in service of revelation is slow, painstaking work, but its results appear effortless in the best nonfiction. Maggie Messitt achieves this in her elegant first book, The … Continued
(Toronto, Ontario: McClelland & Stewart, 2015) Fibonacci numbers were, I think, my first formal introduction to the idea that math and science are essential to the beauty of the natural world. I was in early elementary school when I learned … Continued
(Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2014) Think of one year of your life when you were perfectly happy. Not a special day, or that week you spent in Cabo, but a full year. Can you do it? In … Continued
(Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Arts Press, 2014) Many of the poems in Erika Jo Brown’s debut collection, I’m Your Huckleberry, are “traditional” love poems written to the speaker’s beloved. But Brown’s poems are also love poems to language (not the language … Continued
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015) “All day I was digging Armenian bones out of the Syrian desert…” So remembers poet and essayist Peter Balakian in the titular poem of his new collection, Ozone Journal. One hundred years on, … Continued
Translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole (New York, NY: New Directions, 2015) “Otherwise, it would have returned to the darkness…” At almost exactly the midpoint of Yoel Hoffman’s Moods, the first-person narrator (who throughout the book refers to himself … Continued
(Ann Arbor, MI: Dzanc Books, 2015) Coming into my adult life in the post-9/11, bubble-and-burst epoch of my country’s history, I have formed some jumbled impressions of what precisely other people mean when they refer to ‘The American Dream.’ It … Continued
(New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015) It’s strange how you can see the same things day after day and not give them a second thought. I ride a train into work every day. I keep my head down and … Continued
Works Discussed: The Shunra and the Schmetterling by Yoel Hoffman, translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole; The Heart is Katmandu by Yoel Hoffman, translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole; The Christ of Fish by Yoel Hoffman, translated from the Hebrew by … Continued
Translated from the French by Alison Anderson (New York, NY: Europa Editions, 2010) I finished The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris, by Leїla Marouane, on a night when it was raining in Tallahassee, and the café where I had … Continued
(New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2014) Mary Oliver is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet whose visionary work has so captured the minds and hearts of her readers that she stands as the leading seller of poetry in America today. Her … Continued
(Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2015) People often seek comfort in labels and borders. Today, these exist for every aspect of our lives: race, class, gender, personality, intelligence, sexuality. The truth is that none of these are as black … Continued
Among the many invented optical devices crucial to David Grand’s novel, Mount Terminus, the invertiscope is the most fascinating, an essential commentary on the way people apprehend the world around them. For this novel is about the creation of worlds—constructed … Continued
Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2012) Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle is one of those rare books that appears at first to be failing miserably at what a novel is supposed to do, but then … Continued
(New York: Black Lawrence Press, 2015) I have long been interested in the relationship between the poem and the moment or, perhaps more precisely, the moment as it sits perched within memory. But after my sister’s sudden and unexpected passing, … Continued
When I saw Jeff Allen in Miami this fall, he gave me a copy of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s great book Americanah, in which the protagonist, a blogger, writes “Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, … Continued