About Book Marks
Henry Chandonnet
Recent Reviews
Selma Blair
Rave ArtsFuse It is a pleasure to report that Selma Blair’s Mean Baby rises above the dismal mean. Where others are lifeless excursions into hubris, Mean Baby exudes an air of genuine self-reflection, a grounded modesty ... Blair is so good at writing about personal strife that the industry tittle-tattle portion is surprisingly lackluster ... Maybe she hasn’t \'conquered\' her traumas, but Blair has articulated them clearly and cleanly, and that in itself is a kind of triumph.
Ocean Vuong
Rave The Arts Fuse Death and art go hand-in-hand. In fact, loss has often inspired enormous creative innovation. Still, meditations on death can be somewhat one-note, forcing the reader to experience, over and over, the all-consuming sadness that comes from grieving. In his newest collection of poetry, Time Is a Mother, Ocean Vuong masterfully eludes this obstacle. The poet’s language recognizes the trauma of death, but also revels in the glory of life ... This collection reprises some of the flourishes in Vuong’s earlier writing, particularly the way he focuses on the smallest, most fleeting moments to discover surprising emotional resonances ... Still, Vuong moves in a new direction here, embracing self-reflection ... It should be noted that, in some of his poems, Vnong’s self-conscious excavation of the past may become inscrutable. Vuong plays with form and structure throughout Time Is a Mother, often avoiding punctuation and scrambling up his stanzas and line breaks. For the attentive reader, this challenge rewards because it forces a greater attentiveness to the language. In this sense, Vuong is very much a modernist. But for those who hold, as Mary Oliver would put it, that poems are like prayers, these indirect explorations of mourning may contain too much to grapple with ... The formatting of the poem makes it a somewhat daunting read, from the lack of punctuation and the mid-thought line breaks to the staggered line placement. Still, Vuong’s strategy, though difficult, is necessary: the lack of punctuation makes the poem seem to be unending, a forever testament to the ecstasy of youth. The poet makes powerful use of a paradox here, as in the rest of the collection: the mid-thought line breaks give the poem an erratic, spontaneous feel, but the regimented line staggering insists on structure, even a sense of uniformity. By yoking together intimacy and distance, Time Is a Mother, dramatizes how love and loss subtly intertwine.