PositiveThe NationTreating its subject with a healthy dose of veneration and criticism, Shatz’s book is also a remarkable work of intellectual synthesis ... In his effort to demythologize Fanon as a revolutionary, Shatz sometimes obscures the reasons why Macey called him the \"apostle of violence\" ... When confronted with the more revolutionary, more nationalistic, more violent, and more truculent Fanons, Shatz’s book can emit a note of high-minded frustration or bewildered rebuke.
Ben Lerner
MixedThe New RepublicThe Hatred of Poetry is a beefed-up version of Lerner’s 2015 London Review of Books essay, which he expanded to include a chatty tour of the Western tradition, from original poetry-hater Plato, to John Keats, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman, and concluding with contemporary poets Amiri Baraka and Claudia Rankine ... I read The Hatred of Poetry as a referendum on the lyric, at whose altar Lerner worships, and which I find, to use the language of post-structural hermeneutics, kind of gross. While I may happen to disagree with Lerner’s often-conservative account, he is unique among contemporary poets for holding out a poetics and a position, which he discusses with remarkable amiability ... One consequence of this is that Lerner spends much of the book accusing poems of not possessing a quality that he claims is impossible to possess ... In the end his book is an account of the special love-hate relationship that poets have with their art. What’s missing here is political economy.
