RaveThe New YorkerLike much of Lerner’s work, the book is full of uneasy divisions ... Can be uncannily beautiful ... The flickering between worlds—call it reënchantment—that Lerner seeks is, after all, not merely a game. We might want very badly to be in the presence of people who are gone ... [An] astonishing title poem ... This poet, who has dreamed himself awake, need not choose between the safety of the familiar and the thrill of the alien. To live in the world, his poem tells us, is already to know more than we can say.
Maggie Millner
RaveThe New YorkerStand further back from the passage and you can see the poet herself laying out the parts she’s been given, finding the \'hundred screws,\' the \'plastic pegs,\' the words with which she’ll make those parts into a serviceable whole. As anyone who has assembled a piece of ikea furniture knows, things rarely line up perfectly, and what you’re left with is something you can live with but also something that will never entirely conceal that you are the one who put it together. Rhyme is working that way here ... What Millner has built, after all, is not a bed but a poem, one that wants you to notice its own discomfort in its anachronistic, unfashionable form ... If the tendency of rhyme, like that of desire, is to pull distant things together and force their boundaries to blur, then the countervailing force in this book, the one that makes it go, is the impulse toward narrative ... Millner’s ultimate achievement is to draw open the distance between the book’s first line and its ostensibly identical second, between the self that one takes as given and the self, no less true, that one cannot help but make.
Victoria Chang
PositiveThe New Yorker\" If Obit sought a container for loss, Dear Memory is a messier formal experiment, an open-ended inquiry not of a bounded life but of an ongoing present, full of longing and imperfection ... Chang has followed language to the edge of what she knows; the question her book asks is whether language can go further still, whether it can be trusted to secure a safe landing for that dangling preposition ... Where the letters in the book are searching and digressive, written without expectation of an answer, the interview is a formal, real-time exchange ... In one of their conversation’s most wrenching moments, Chang’s mother recalls a memory from her journey to Taiwan ... The simple story haunts the book, revealing a latent truth of these letters: between parents and children, there is always some radical gap—one that we must live with, and in. A child may feel as though the hand she holds will never let go; a mother may think that the child is \'hers.\' Neither is right. The connection between them is an invention, an experimental grammar. We make it up as we go.
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