Vol 4.2

Cleveland Review of Books, Vol. 4.2: Ben Cosman on Miriam Toews’s A Truce That Is Not Peace, whose answer to why she writes arrives late and small: because her sister asked her to, before her sister stopped speaking at all. Abigail Robejsek on Hilda Hilst’s The Obscene Madame D by way of Kristeva, Bataille, and one very literate wounded pig. David Isenberg reports from Holmes County, Ohio, where Amish farmers who don’t believe in climate change have accidentally built the lowest-carbon lifestyle around, while their climate-conscious Mennonite neighbors can’t afford to keep pace. Dante LaRiccia revisits Dwight Macdonald’s Atrocities of the Mind and its suspicion that turning violence into art is no more than a respectable way of looking away. Rhian Sasseen goes looking for Adrienne Rich’s burning typewriter, and finds it in a Tumblr adolescence, a losing presidential campaign in Iowa, and a Twitter account live-tweeting 2001 in real time. Alina Stefanescu gets deep into the apostrophe, that most desperate piece of grammar, where we can’t help addressing the people who will never answer back.

Lewis Freedman and Kai Ihns talk through julie ezelle patton’s J Walking Through the Alphabet, including the time she took a friend’s book into the bathtub, let it disintegrate, and sculpted the pulp into a ball. Noah Warren surveys the new algorithmic poets—Wilson, Salameh, Hourani, Salem—who’ve stopped fighting the machine’s logic and started adding flowcharts, tables, and how-tos to their poetry. Claire Donato builds her psychoanalyst a dollhouse-sized replica of her own office and thinks it might be the only true room she’s ever had. Jess Boeke asks what a Rust Belt fibershed can learn from a wetland, since water, per Toni Morrison, never forgets where it used to be.

Matt Zbrog’s “Death to America” follows four influencers through Europe as their captions get closer and closer to a confession. Jess Conway’s “The Wretch” is a grifter’s monologue, fluent in self-help speak if utterly without a self to help. Priscilla Posada’s “The Great Happiness Space” serves clam pasta during a hostage negotiation.

Poetry from Lloyd Wallace, an anaphoric catalog of everything a scrambled mind chooses to keep; Allison Pitinii Davis, touring Lordstown and Romero zombies; and Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz with a bilingual poem on the border wall.