RavePloughsharesMy Pinup does not disappoint ... This slim volume may be the most interesting writing on Prince we will ever see ... That the essay has not been adjusted to acknowledge Prince’s death in 2016 makes for some jarring moments ... Nonetheless, what Als says of Prince’s music still illuminates and convinces ... Brief as it is, My Pinup is the kind of journalism that takes a running leap and lands in the literary canon.
Marilynne Robinson
RavePloughsharesRobinson lets us feel every delicate, evanescent, seemingly impossible minute of it ... Robinson’s novels are like glaciers. They move slowly, but they leave behind a transformed landscape.
Victoria Chang
RavePloughsharesChang’s obits, though, come as if from a parallel universe of obituaries, with different rules about what obits can say and how they can say it. Newspaper obits tend to linearity and coherence, for instance, hoping to convince us that our lives make a nice, consistent package; Chang’s are as quicksilver as memory in their leaps and landings ... These obits are fearless. They are also specific and intimate ... I should mention what they gain by being together. For one thing, the dates acquire new significance—not that the poems are in chronological sequence, but readers can notice recurrences and patterns, the clusters of poems around certain dates, intuit a kind of narrative ... The emotional power of Chang’s Obits comes from the grace and honesty with which she turns this familiar form inside out to show us the private side of family, the knotting together of generations, the bewilderment of grief.
Paul Muldoon
RavePloughsharesLike Bob Dylan, [Muldoon] makes a point of never being exactly where we expect him to be while somehow remaining distinctively himself. Muldoon’s extraordinary facility with both familiar and rare closed forms and his acrobatically inventive rhyming and off-rhyming have diminished not a whit in his sixties ... Poets as formally dexterous as Muldoon run the risk of being accused of emotional dryness or chilly indifference to the urgent sociopolitical concerns of the hour, and both charges have at times been floated in his direction. Neither applies ... Nothing is more Muldoonian than ending a book with a long poem—every collection since Why Brownlee Left in 1983 has ended so—and it is hard to imagine a more Muldoonian long poem than \'Frolic and Detour.\' ... The volume is Muldoonian, too, in including several elegies: C. K. Williams, Richard Wilbur, Leonard Cohen, John Ashbery. The examples of Cohen and Ashbery seem peculiarly apposite as Muldoon wheels into what may be his \'late\' phase. Like Ashbery in his final collections, or Cohen in his final albums, Muldoon has nothing left to prove, and can take delight simply in doing what he inimitably does. And his delight is ours.
