An eddy, the titular inspiration for this show, is a flowing water phenomenon where the current is disrupted by inverse movement, causing a whirlpool. This exhibit of young emerging sculptors makes a similar gesture against a cultural current, long spiraling toward doom. M23 is a small gallery in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the […]
Reviews
Breaking Currents: eddy at M23
Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine
Reviewed by Sophia Kaufman
At the end of Ziwe Fumudoh’s Instagram Live shows this summer—in which she quizzed her guests on civil rights leaders, asked them whether they’d ever worn blackface, what they qualitatively like about Black people, how many Black friends they have, and whether they would commit to reparations, among other rapid-fire prompts often tailored to her […]
Explorations in Friendship & Witchcraft in The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
by Aya Kusch
Long before Sephora started selling “Starter Witch Kits” and books with titles like Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive became mainstream, the Mexican-British surrealist painter, Leonora Carrington, was conjuring her own magical realms with the help of paint and the written word. Her wild life was marked by adventure, rebellion, and an irrepressible desire to create. […]
The Art of Poetry And Translation: How The Disappearing Ox Reimagines a Buddhist Parable
by Aya Kusch
The Disappearing Ox is available for $28 at Brilliantbooks.com In the 1990s, the artist Max Gimblett suggested a novel yet intriguing project to the poet Lewis Hyde; that they create a modern, American version of the twelfth-century Chinese parable known as the Oxherding series. Hyde agreed, and from there emerged an odyssey into the realm […]
Peter Milne Greiner, Temporal Cyborg
Reviewed by Christopher Cokinos
Lost City Hydrothermal Field by Peter Milne Greiner The Operating System, 2017 148 pp., $18 The poet David Wojahn has made the distinction between the poetry of stuff and the poetry of wisdom. The former, he claims, is the deployment of references in often pell-mell fashion; it does clutter so much poetry today, especially that […]
Thousand Star Hotel by Bao Phi
(reviewed by Brian Satrom)
THOUSAND STAR HOTEL by Bao Phi Coffee House Press (2017) 110 pages reviewed by Brian Satrom What authors empathize with in their work can reveal a great deal about their perceptions of themselves. The poem “Not a Silverfish,” toward the end of Bao Phi’s second collection, Thousand Star Hotel, has the speaker imagining the perspective of […]
Poems in Water by Mary Langer Thompson
(reviewed by Carol Smallwood)
POEMS IN WATER by Mary Langer Thompson Green Fuse Poetic Arts (2014) 57 pages reviewed by Carol Smallwood Every poetry collection creates its own sense of space: geographic, cultural, and personal: word selection and use are fingerprints of each writer. The reader tastes a new world and if the poet is good, the world is […]
Velvet Rodeo by Kelly McQuain
(reviewed by Marc Frazier)
VELVET RODEO by Kelly McQuain Bloom Books (March 2014) 42 pages reviewed by Marc Frazier This collection takes us on a journey back to our roots as individuals largely shaped by family. There are siblings here, parents, even a step-grandfather. Though the poet is gay, he is not slavishly bound to writing strictly from that […]
Adrift in a Vanishing City by Vincent Czyz
(from the preface by Samuel R. Delany)
by Vincent Czyz Rain Mountain Press (May 2015) 238 pages from the preface by Samuel R. Delany Like every one of the last three dozen MFA theses I’ve read, the following text is neither a novel nor, really, a collection of stand-alone stories. Familiar characters—Zirque (rhymes with Jerk), Blue Jean, the Duke of Pallucca—disappear or […]
On the Move with Neil Shepard’s Vermont Exit Ramps
(reviewed by Tony Whedon)
VERMONT EXIT RAMPS by Neil Shepard Big Table Publishing 50 pages reviewed by Tony Whedon Four decades ago Leo Marx defined the central conceit of the American pastoral as the steam locomotive breaking a nineteenth century forest’s silence. In his classic The Machine in the Garden Marx examined that figure’s significance to American literature as it chugged through […]
