About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Rachel Cusk
Positive London Review of Books Sends the coin spinning on its edge every time you flip it. It’s the most musical work she has written.
Iman Mersal
Rave New York Review of Books Mersal’s style is... understated, ironic, colloquial ... Mersal doesn’t offer herself as a representative of her country, culture, or religion, and her feminism manifests not as a creed but as a tone, a disposition toward life and love. Her voice is so inviting, so familiar, so confiding that it’s even easy to forget that these are translations: Creswell renders her as a perfect contemporary.
Doireann Ní Ghríofa
Positive The New York Review of Books Ní Ghríofa is a poet through and through: in this prose work she writes lyrical sentences that make the physical world come alive ... almost everything Ní Ghríofa notices gains significance by rhyming with something else. Metaphors and metonyms are her metier; omens and dreams are mirrors of deep mind ... As bits and pieces of her own life are woven through the tale of her pursuit of Ní Chonaill, we are given intimate personal details ... there is a crucial aspect of Ní Ghríofa’s experience that she marginalizes throughout the memoir, and that is the hidden heart of it: how she translated the \'Caoineadh.\' Although at the back of the book she gives us the poem in Irish Gaelic, her exciting translation, and a list of references for further reading, I wanted much more ... Ní Ghríofa certainly gives us a new, feminist vision of a woman saving another woman, righting a historical imbalance that persists in women’s continued sacrifices, from lopped donor ponytails to donated breastmilk to lopsided breasts. In one of the most poignant instances of mystical reciprocity, Ní Ghríofa writes a poem about Ní Chonaill that ends up winning a prize; the purse is enough to put a down payment on a house at long last. Thus do stanzas translate into real rooms. I wish we had been given a room-by-room tour of Ní Chonaill’s stanzas.
Hilary Holladay
Positive London Review of Books (UK) Hilary Holladay’s biography—the first—is pleasingly economical, condensing more than eight decades into four hundred pages. It is admiring and sympathetic, but occasionally cocks an eyebrow ... Holladay reveals the extent to which actual, first-hand suffering also informed Rich’s aesthetics ... one doesn’t read Rich for la comédie humaine, stylistic sprezzatura, or pleasure of any sort—unless one takes pleasure in moral indignation, which Lionel Trilling once claimed was a distinct feature of the American middle-class liberal. Yet Holladay reveals the extent to which actual, first-hand suffering also informed Rich’s aesthetics[.]
John Berryman, ed. Philip Coleman and Calista McRae
Rave Book Post On a good day, pondering the life of poet John Berryman can be distressing ... Berryman the wag is very much in evidence in his letters, as is Berryman the professor, Berryman the son, the husband, the wooer, all with their complement of registers ... It is these letters [...] that accentuate the seraphic intelligence of the man trying to rise above alcoholism, insomnia, colitis; the side effects of medications; \'Todesangst.\'
Karen Solie
Rave The New York Review of Books Almost nothing prepares the reader of her early books for the turn she has taken in The Caiplie Caves—that is, if you took the author of \'modern and normal\' at her word ... Solie performs a legerdemain of time and space and personal identity to grapple with the current political reality. The closest approximation I can think of is something like Seamus Heaney’s North, whose sequence of desolate landscape poems uses the figures of excavated bog people of northern Europe to allegorize Ireland’s unspeakable civil strife ... Solie does not dispense with the stand-alone lyric, and she does not create dull stretches of narrative information. The intensity of language is extraordinarily sustained ... Like its landscape, it’s a chilly read, bereft of appeasement or good humor. Rarely has Solie unleashed such a full-throated snarl ... And rarely has she sounded more anguished or penitent ... What The Caiplie Caves loses in comedy, it gains in beauty: the sublime kind, pitiless and magisterial ... Solie’s powers of description have never been so acute, her senses so greedy ... Solie would deny that she works miracles. I beg to differ.
Alice Oswald
Rave The New York Review of Books Part of what makes the poem gripping is its anonymity, or as Woolf would say, its \'impersonality.\' The \'Nobody\' who speaks is both the nameless poet and the many-voiced sea, but the characters’ stories are alluded to without their names. They are given only in the endpages, typeset as in ancient Greek with no spaces between words, just letters flowing continuously in a current, some names bolded and some names in faded font ... Every choice in the book is made toward a fluid, Dionysian collapse of boundaries, with the illicit lovers in the background propelling not the narrative arc exactly, but the narrative desire ... Where the sea is compared to a blind blue eye, so desire is blind and vast and infinitely dangerous. The scale of desire in the face of the universe, or the scale of the universe in the face of desire—two infinities are somehow trying to come into relation with each other. This desire encompasses our yearning for language: not only for a present language that will convey this vastness, but for languages that have passed away that might really have done so. Woolf’s rhapsody was grounded in not knowing Greek. Oswald writes a history of human desire called Nobody. These absences form a powerful vacuum. We know, as when we see the rapid withdrawal of water along the shoreline, that a tsunami is on its way.
Gary Lutz
Rave London Review of Books (UK) We are carried from hook to hook, like the insomniac narrator who ‘crossed each night by linking one minute securely to the next, building a bridge that swung through the dark’. The pleasurable surprises in these stories have little to do with plot or character. They are lexical, metaphorical and often very droll, which is enough to distract the reader from the spectacular denudation of the lives, couples and truncated families portrayed ... Male and female narrators are interchangeable; sex or gender is no more than window-dressing on bodies that locate equally interchangeable objects of desire ... In his work, there are none of the markers of privilege beloved of other middle-class American fiction writers...addiction or recovery, prison or church membership. The semi-anonymity of the narrators, the gender fluidity, the middling nature of the lives lived, seems to be an attempt to approximate common denominators ... Lutz’s prose is licentious in the archaic sense—a double libertinism. But I shouldn’t give the impression that his Nabokovian flights lift this overcast world into jouissance. Quite the opposite: with Lutz, the materiality of words is not all downy lip and butterflies: it’s as likely—think of the stalactite in the girl’s nostril—to be nauseating ... a ‘lutz’ is ‘a jump in skating with a backward take-off from the backward outside edge of one skate to the backward outside edge of the other, with one or more full turns in the air’. I take this definition from my Apple dictionary, whose wording, so much more awkward than the OED’s, perfectly describes the backward-outside-and-reverse athletics that Gary Lutz performs on the page.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Positive The New York Review of Books Much like his hero Ezra Pound, Ferlinghetti uses his European literary references as a foil for his range of American tonalities, from wiseguy to blue to pulpiteer to comic. The resulting patois recapitulates his own hybrid origins ... Ferlinghetti, for all his populist claims in favor of literary democracy, is too anarchic to deliver a product as consumable as a memoir ... The virtue of Ferlinghetti’s style is its speed: he zips along in the story, condensing his childhood into fourteen pages before loping ahead to his military service. The gravity of these primal scenes emerges in their retelling, some sixty-three pages later ... Self-reflection is not Ferlinghetti’s forte ... The repetition is what advances understanding ... yet, there are odd discrepancies and omissions that raise the question of how much Ferlinghetti remembers or wants to tell ... Ferlinghetti’s style in Little Boy might strike some readers as perverse: one run-on ramble of a sentence, a kind of deathbed recapitulation of a gone century telegraphed in a present-tense flashback.
Diane Williams
Rave The London Review of Books Williams’s fiction has the rhythm and diction of East Coast speech, and the intensity and sociality of the letter-writer who cranks herself up to offer a distillate from the endlessly mundane ... What is veiled (or just normal) about her life is revealed (or fabulated) in her fiction, which is full of funny, libidinal and invigorating enigmas. In her stories, roles and classifications are up for grabs. The narrator is usually a woman, but relations misbehave ... I resist describing Williams as an absurdist or surrealist (though I often think of Leonora Carrington, Samuel Beckett and Gertrude Stein while reading her). The narration is too homely, driven by idiosyncrasy, intimacy, and the valiant effort to maintain dignity. Besides, the sentences that come out of our mouths are routinely weirder than those we think to write ... It’s perfect to leave on the bedside table, to be consulted before one’s dreamlife begins
Nick Laird
Positive The New York Review of Books Americans invented business English and confessional poetry; doing business in the UK is an entirely different thing, and confession there is a chump’s game. Reading Nick Laird...one is always aware that [his] speakers are arguing, persuading, bargaining, carrot-dangling, sleight-of-handing, and losing gallantly ... Laird, having spent some years in the service of a mode of language that smothers any hint of human emotion or subjectivity, can’t resist toying with it in the medium that’s supposed to be all about human emotion and subjectivity ... Subverting the false order of a hyperautomated society, even by violence, becomes a kind of fantasy—and this from an Irishman who has written about real sectarian violence in his childhood ... What’s so animating about Laird is that he is able to hold this idea in his head—that survivors of trauma must speak about their experiences—and simultaneously to believe, as he told The Guardian in an interview in 2005, \'Poetry is fiction as well. It’s like a psychodrama—a walk through someone else.\'
Chelsey Minnis
Positive The New York Review of Books \"Baby, I Don’t Care is not much of a departure—she still wisecracks about her poetry dependency (among other cocktails)—but Minnis makes her methods a bit more transparent, thanking the cable programmers of Turner Classic Movies in her acknowledgments for the lines of dialogue she steals. None of them is footnoted; you’re supposed to guess ... You may find the burlesque overbearing, but you won’t be reminded of the acres of earnest, epiphanic, look-at-me-grocery-shopping-pondering-normal-life free verse of the past half-century, and isn’t that an uplifting thought? Minnis hasn’t forgotten that we have art in order not to die of reality.\