Reviews

Ways to dream

On Claire DeVoogd’s 'Via'

Chris Hosea

Claire DeVoogd is a multifarious poet based in Brooklyn. Via is her first book. Writing more than eight centuries after the legendary Breton poet based at the English court, Marie de France, DeVoogd addresses her literary ancestor casually and intimately, like a familiar spirit. 

Via
Claire DeVoogd
Winter Editions, 2023, 136 pages, $20.00, ISBN 978-1-959708-04-9

“What were the dead like? What sort of people are we living with now? Why are we here? What are we going to do? Let’s try putting it in another way.”

— W. H. Auden, The Orators (1932)

Surrounded by Paris

Yuko Otomo’s ‘PINK’

Kit Robinson
Cover of 'PINK' and Yuko Otomo, photographed by Donald Martineau-Vega

Written in Japanese and translated by the author, Yuko Otomo’s PINK is a paean to Paris, to her revered precursor, Baudelaire, and to her soulmate, the American poet Steve Dalachinsky. As she explains in a generously spontaneous afterword, Steve and Yuko visited Paris nearly every other year for 15 years or so. 

PINK
Yuko Otomo
Lithic Press, 2024, 67 pages, $20.00, ISBN 978-1-946583-30-7

Mud and the poetics of art history

Lytle Shaw's 'New Grounds for Dutch Landscape'

Joe Milutis
Jan van Goyen, Landscape with Two Oaks, 1641, Rijksmuseum. Photo by the author.
Jan van Goyen, Landscape with Two Oaks, 1641, Rijksmuseum. Photo by the author.

What, then, would a "poetics" of art writing look like, one which is responsible to the facts of the matter, yet still laying the field open for extravagations and speculations? 

New Grounds for Dutch Landscape
Lytle Shaw
OEI editör, 2021, 304 pages, $19.95, ISBN 9789188829085

Secure that delicate passage

On Hajar Hussaini's "Disbound"

John Bosworth

Before the first poem of Afghan poet Hajar Hussaini’s debut collection Disbound, Hussaini already resists the limits of the book’s form, positioning her text in a conflict between sequence and chaos, what is threaded together and what imminently, and presently, comes apart.

Disbound
Hajar Hussaini
University of Iowa Press, 2022, 77 pages, $19.95, ISBN 9781609388676

In the presence of absence

A review of Annette Gilbert’s ‘Literature’s Elsewheres’

Amanda Hurtado
In the presence of absence

Whether you call it poetry, experimental — non-retinal — appropriation — propositional — or site-specific literature, conceptual writing, a constellation of literary practices, an “instantiated entity,” an otherness, or an elsewhere . . . the literary works presented in Gilbert’s book “reflect upon and performatively test the actual, literal conditions of their existence.”

Literature’s Elsewheres
Annette Gilbert
The MIT Press 2022, 432 pages, $34.95, ISBN 9780262543415

 

language becomes an infinite museum, whose center is everywhere and whose limits are nowhere.

—Robert Smithson, 1968[1]