Ruby’s style of argument—choppy, playful, sometimes sonically enticing—invites us to look, not just at “poetry” as a concept, but at the poem we happen to read, whose sounds we likely imagine in our heads as we move to the end of each line, along with the person who might have composed it.

Each appearance of gender, which is to say each appearance in our lives of those fuzzy unconscious signals, breaks up and splits into multiple messages.

The poems in Grand Tour are marked by restlessness: their speakers seem uncomfortable, even trapped, within their lyric moments.

Chekhov’s gun isn’t always firing; sometimes it’s just the small, insignificant moments that happen in the meantime, described with clarity and grace, pinpricks of tenderness, the levity of a vignette that passes, that means nothing, that means everything, that exists.

The result is a remarkable work of synthesis, overlay, and double exposure, in which past and present, child and adult, literary figure and family member illuminate each other. 

None of the author’s controversies have been as bizarre as the one he finds himself in presently, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, circles back to his preoccupation with sex.

If a shared appreciation of culture is a means of expressing these desires covertly, Our Evenings suggests that it can also prove treacherous.

I see nothing controversial in the authors’ core argument: that it’s not anti-feminist to wonder whether to have children, and that women who are ambivalent about the question should address it in a timely, direct, and collaborative manner.

Labatut and Best both fear this outcome. But Labatut does not realize we already live in a world governed by an alien intelligence.

Levrero’s characters often uncover something long neglected, or turn inward in some other way. Consequently, the protagonists in these stories are seemingly at odds with their reality.

I know that I can never purchase the identity I feel stripped of by histories of immigration and assimilation and gaysian self-hatred. This doesn’t make silk less pleasurable or persimmons less delicious.

Can there be a reparative mode of reading the earth, Dreaming seems to ask, that draws us into an epoch of the geopathic? Or a mode of repair that does not draw from the paradigm of work and working?

While she positions herself as an inside critic fed up with the excesses of the left, and as someone who embraces Marxist ideas herself, her recent work demonstrates serious confusion about the nature of exploitation, one of the most basic Marxist concepts.

The too-familiar process by which the commercial mainstream comes to subsume always more peripheral cultural elements is one of Kunzru’s compositional black holes. The question of how to make art in conditions of stalled futurity is another.

It often seems like this is not a book in praise of excess so much as one deathly afraid of it. Everything truly excessive is neutralized, sublimated into rarefied high culture and righteous philosophy. Sometimes shit is worth just staying with.

There is a Beguine spirit in renunciation. But without a God for whom they can gouge their eyes out, Nicholson’s speakers become not separate from the world, but marked by it. They let it in with a private sense that they may not really be of it.

In revisionist feminist art and literary histories, a premium is placed on the young, suicidal woman

These are in many ways Marxist novels, or at least grounded in Marxist critiques of what the wage and bourgeois society do to the human soul. Labor and land are decisive forces on these characters. They squat in inherited apartments or drift on boats.

Maksymchuk’s words accrue a mountain of humanity in the ends of inhumanity. Ascend it; peer over language’s walls. Can her poetics actually cross them all?

Kinsky maintains that film is a contact sport: not simply fingertips feeding celluloid through a projector (though this is detailed often and affectionately), but also eyes carrying images like palmfuls of water