RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Henry Dumas’s stories frequently take place in a United States much as we know it today, but in which the doors to other worlds are slightly more than ajar. This porousness lends a mythic shimmer to daily life ... And within this world of expanded possibilities and persistent, violent white supremacy, we often find Dumas’s men talking about what might happen next. This new edition of Echo Tree gives us the fullest sense of the writer’s stereoscopic vision, in which popular uprisings are provoked by acts of violence, and by the Great Depression ... Dumas’s vernacular writing is lustrous and well-worn ... Dumas was an accomplished poet, and when he gathers up for a moment of sublimity in his fiction, it is to underscore quiet isolation and the need to escape ... A new introduction by John Keene provides valuable coordinates for Dumas’s fables and highlights the importance of Dumas’s political convictions after the killing of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. But Keene might have gone further ... Certain kinds of renown – many readers will know how Dumas died before they have read a page of him – tend to flatten or caricature the work, encouraging readers to seek anticipatory echoes of a terminal struggle. One need not look very far for such echoes in Dumas’s fiction, but the nature of his writing is such that I doubt it can be flattened.
Anahid Nersessian
RaveThe Nation... powerful and perceptive readings of his six major odes, in which she locates a vision of the modern world’s painful impact on human bodies that is not just reflective of Karl Marx’s theories, but necessary to a fuller understanding of his thought ... None is more persuasive than her treatment of \'Ode on a Grecian Urn\' ... a far-reaching and deeply felt analysis of the university itself as one of the would-be communes that we offer to vulnerable young people ... The \'Grecian Urn\' chapter is exemplary—I suspect this will become the reading most undergrads are taught in the coming years—and representative, with each of the other chapters using a similarly scrupulous reading of a single \'Ode\' as a method of exploring ideas from more recent poets (Sean Bonney, Alice Notley, Juliana Spahr) and poet-memoirists (Anne Boyer, Renee Gladman), critical theory (Eve Sedgwick, Édouard Glissant, Mariarosa Dalla Costa), and Nersessian’s own reflections from a lifetime of reading Keats and pursuing scholarship ... Both Nersessian and Baldwin make a case for great literature’s ability to foster conversations and understanding across difference, a case that seems too frequently absent from our current discussions about the canon and its use.