MixedHyperallergicTsabari’s work is told in self-contained chapters that resemble short stories. They are, by turns, tragic and humorously picaresque, and often both at the same time ... In The Art of Leaving one can sense the author’s long way home: the path toward her father’s literary inheritance...The author’s wanderlust seems in a direct relationship with her complex feelings toward her identity. She humorously recounts that, for years, she called her bank account \'the Wandering Jew fund\' ... the relentless travels pay off, allowing the author to acquire \'skills I cannot list on any resume, like rolling joints while driving, bargaining in bazaars, or getting by in foreign countries with hardly any money.\' There is no doubt that precisely these “skills” – and her desire to playfully recount them – make up a bag of tricks for this storyteller-raconteur, allowing for flowing and entertaining prose, even while writing about difficult personal matters.
Ilya Kaminsky
PositiveTablet... nurtured by a commitment to poetry as a form of resistance, dialogue, and a noble spiritual vocation—ethos that hearkens back to poetry’s origins and its power. Kaminsky’s engagement with Soviet poets who wrote in the face of authoritarian regimes, and for whom poetry had unthinkably high stakes, imbues this work with urgency and pathos ... The most moving aspect of the collection is Kaminsky’s ability to infuse beauty and even irony into this difficult work.
Sophia Shalmiyev
PositiveHyperallergic...experimental work... a collection of loosely connected fragments, resembling short prose poems that dash across time, languages, and continents. The brokenness of the self, as presented by Shalmiyev, is so thorough that fragmentation seems the only viable mode of expression: for the narrator, the intensity and pain of memories past manifest as short bursts of thought rather than coherent narratives ... If the brutality of the muted, abacus-like accounting of threats recalls Kafka, the “congealment” and fear manifest themselves in Shalmiyev’s own writing style, that, within a single paragraph can leaps across years of memories, reflections, and evasions ... harsh, pained, and eloquent flashes of prose...interspersed with invocations of various literary influences.
Lou Reed
RaveTabletWhat emerges is more than a story of an artistic detour in the career of a recording musician: it is a glimpse into a more personal, vulnerable, and yet gregarious and experimental Lou Reed ... One of the greatest things about the book is that it preserves not only the poems but also the chatter between them. Anderson calls these snippets \'Avant-garde stand-up … parallel poems\' ... On the page, these may seem like merely witty lines. But to hear Reed’s voice, dripping with that \'parody of the instinct,\' to experience the whole range of his \'theater of voices,\' is sublime.
