Short Reviews
In this thread, I'd like you to post short reviews (2-5 paragraphs) that you think are good. Please accompany the links with a few sentences on what makes them good.
Since I mentioned Zach's short reviews earlier this semester, here's one of Feelings by Lauren Ireland.
It does a great job of combining a lot of the kind of close-reading discussions/description we do in class - complete with quotes from teh book - with some larger arguments and contexts.
For the same reason, here's Abby Burns' review of Carmen Machado's Her Body and Other Parties.
Here's a slightly longer review (8 paragraphs!) but also a good example, in this case Henk Roussouw reviews Uljana Wolf's Subsisters.
I look forward to reading your links - and your reviews!
Johannes
http://makemag.com/review-heliopause/
ReplyDeleteThis review I'm sharing comes from MAKE magazine, which seems to take great care with its reviews overall: this piece in particular is a review of Heather Christle's Heliopause, reviewed by K. Rose Miller.
I wanted to share this piece in part because it has been pretty recently published (February of this year), but also because it's so attentive to the framing device of a review. Miller begins with a general observation (and definitional approach) to enter the text--a tactic that I've seen a number of times in reputably published reviews. And by opening (and closing) with a NASA framework, Miller opens up Christle's text to a wider view outside of poetry itself--at least that's the intent, I think. Besides this frame, however, Miller takes a stance that I would see myself modelling a review after: in paragraph two, she contextualizes Christle's work; in paragraph three, she gestures towards wider poetic trends/concerns while also zeroing in on how those wider concerns are manifest in the text at hand; in paragraph four, Miller fully dives into the specifics of Christle's text without losing sight of more general concerns and iterations (and further focuses on and demonstrates in paragraph five); and in paragraph six, as mentioned above, Miller brings the review back into full view by evoking her opening framing device once again to wrap things up. In my opinion, this is a tightly constructed and generous review that demonstrates the reviewer's familiarity of the text without seeming like a starstruck fan.
A little bonus/aside:
http://bostonreview.net/poetry/raymond-mcdaniel-l-s-klatt-microreview
I'm pasting this link of Raymond McDaniel's review of Lew Klatt's Cloud of Ink. This is an older review, but it's also a considered one of Boston Review's "microreviews"--and, so-named, it's a mere paragraph long (albeit a fairly long single paragraph). Johannes, I think, already knows that Klatt was my first genuine introduction to poetry and creative writing (with them being contiguous in the same program at UGA), but aside from this shameless homage to Lew's second collection, I thought this "microreview" might present an interesting contrast to the 2-5 (or 6) paragraph review that we'll be sharing. Part of why I find this review noteworthy is its virtual lack of context: the weight of the review relies on McDaniel's use of critical language--with just a few excerpted lines from the reviewed text--to craft a review that gives only the briefest of glimpses into the text itself. Putting a review into the brevity of this pressure cooker forces the reviewer and the reader alike to sink teeth into the juiciest and most enticing bits while encouraging the potential audience to pick up a plate for seconds. (Again, just a point of contrast, but this example might offer a different strategy to consider.)
ReplyDeleteHere's Steven Zultanski's review of Juliana Huxtable's "Mucus in My Pineal Gland" :
http://www.4columns.org/zultanski-steven/mucus-in-my-pineal-gland
Here's a sample from the collection, as offered on ShitWonder:
REAL DOLLS, ANIMATRONICS, FAUX-HUMAN ACCESSORIES, THE ABOLITION OF LAWS SURROUNDING ADOPTION, EX-VETERO FERTILIZATION
THE LIVE FEED AND PROFILE STAND AS TRUTH.
IF HISTORY WAS ROBBED, WE TAKE IT BACK BY PEELING AWAY AT LAYERS OF WIKIPEDIA DEBATES (SUBJECT LINE) RE: AUTHENTICITY.
BLACK SAMURAIS
MOORS
THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION
WHO ARE THE MODEN ASCETICS?
WEAVES FOR ERYBODY!
-----------
Zultanski quickly/purposefully/Deftly contextualizes the Poet for us without delineating or categorizing, which he recognizes as antithetical to the moves this particular artist concerns herself with. In paragraph 1 he begins with a step out of the book-subject to hone-in on the nuance Huxtable integrates/instigates via her multi-mediaz, which guides the review's flight itself into a kindred tandemness, which results in resistance to limiting the 'trajectory'/expansion of Huxtables work:
"In this way, Huxtable’s work is not just an exercise in simulacra: sure, it layers references to memes, nightlife, and fashion, but always in light of lived psychological and social tensions."
= Sets the Stage for Now entering a toe-dabbling review of the book itself!
At which point Zultanski adeptly twins the concern with dismantling genre-discrimination/categorization with the same impulse-problematic of identity-labeling:
" Billed as “poems, performance scripts, and essays,” the pieces don’t fit neatly into any of those categories. That doesn’t mean that the question of genre disappears: rather, it reappears consistently throughout the book as undecidable."
Zultanski then engages with more specificity, making an incision with a "confessional" screwdriver to complicate the prospective reader's attempt at "reading into" that which is taken for granted as assumable. KNOW WHAT I MEAN?!? I like that the review itself mirrors this non-conceit.
We then get a play-by-play of one poem/piece in particular, "HOOD BY AIR". The review opens this real nice, and then hooks into a common question between the reviewed book and the review: "a sense of the real". Wow! *And* this little hook is where Zultanski's Particular Read is able to glisten and harmonize with Pineal Gland, performing my aforementioned tandemness and glee. Here's the key paragraph to the whole thing (for me):
"The slipperiness of this “sense of the real” is a fundamental concern in Huxtable’s work, and maybe especially in Mucus in My Pineal Gland. The scenes describing physical and psychological sensation—the feeling of touch, the feeling of worry, the feeling of memory—spill into theoretical speculations and mashed-up Internet discourse. Perhaps I’m falling for the allure of authenticity that Huxtable’s work critiques, but I found these scenes of intimacy genuinely moving: not because they made me feel closer to the artist, or because I saw myself in them, but because they vividly conjured the specifics of an experience. Whether or not these scenes are “true,” the intimacy reads as personal, which makes the more abstract passages in the book less distant. Genres contaminate each other, so that the theory seems personal and the personal seems theoretical."
Ciao folks-
ReplyDeleteThis is a link to a review on Estilo by Dolores Dorantes (trans. Jen Hofer) written by Geneve Chao. It was also recently written (September 2017, bilingual edition of the book came out via Kenning Editions in 2016) but I mainly wanted to share it because Chao calls out several strains that seem relevant to our current discussions. Also it's a bilingual review of a bilingual book which is just stellar. Chao does a pseudo-close reading, while still recognizing a universality of application for this text, as not only a self-referential unit. Hits up confessional vs witness, multilingualism, translation, trauma and bodily violence.
https://medium.com/anomalyblog/at-the-tip-of-which-stigma-appears-estilo-style-de-dolores-dorantes-f9c1a9a1a920
It's longer than 5 paragraphs, so I wanted to stick a couple excerpts here to highlight parts where Chao speaks more directly about things linking our interests and what Dorantes/Hofer succeed in.
"The problems of translation are legion, as we who live within its double mirrors know: a constant misalignment of lenses, a constant stream of imperfect possibilities and inadvertent exclusions. This book...foregrounds rather than conceals these problems."
"[D]efinitions recur at intervals through the book and appear to be lifted from a dictionary except for the middle of three, which addresses the reader, tú, thus: “si buscas conscientemente un estilo, terminas adoptando una careta… (if you consciously seek a style, you’ll end up taking on a mask…)” and it is here that the book seems to hang, in between consicousness of voice and ignorance of self, in between assertion and reflection, entre la denuncia y la agrésion."
"Throughout these short bursts of command and cajolement, Dorantes’s language remains lambent and economical in its music. The patterns of song in her cuáls and cons and ques provides certain pleasure, and Hofer’s English finds its own chant of which and with, exposing the weft of this network of girls, this army of girls calling out their erstwhile leaders, emerging from under the muddy boots of presidents to force men to meet their gaze. Las niñas llevamos tu máscara de presidencia perfecta. “We, the girls, wear your mask of perfect presidency.” (You have ended up wearing a mask.)"
"To read Estilo/Style is to inhabit that electrified space. Language is a mine. A girl is a mine. Either may explode at any time. Ben Ehrenreich writes, “this book burns with a rage that does not hope for healing.” Dorantes finishes, “It will wait to find you as if it were coincidence.” Estilo/Style does not explode these mines. It pinpoints them, digs them out, holds them up to the light, still live, waiting for the inevitable flash. We are on tenterhooks. We are raw. Somos a flor de piel. Claro."
This is a good review but it doesn't the kind of concentration of the "short review." Your attempt to rewrite it as a short review is excellent - it's useful to think about what you would need to do to change it into a more concentrated, shorter review.
DeleteHere's one. Toby Altman integrates his review of Becca Jensen's AMONG THE DEAD* with a chronology of the food he eats while thinking and writing about it. I love the triangulation of the approach, its strange and often solipsistic meticulousness, the peripateticism/processuality it lends to the thinking through the book.This review reminds me of the appendix I put in my undergrad linguistics thesis which listed the one and a half pages of things I baked during/in lieu of the writing.
ReplyDeletehttps://jacket2.org/reviews/eating-book-review
(* i haven't read this book)
This is an interesting review for sure. Though it's not exactly what I had in mind. In order for this kind of thing to work it must decidedly not be a "short review." With these reviews I'm asking you to write, I'm asking you to follow a very restrictive industry standard. Breaking the rules can be a profound act, but following the most extremely restrictive rules can also be a useful task.
DeleteBut one further thought, lets do an alternative form of review like that for our final blog entry. I think that would be fun and instructive.
DeleteSharing Tim Wood's microreview of "My Life and and My Life in the Nineties" as a reminder to myself to read this book ASAP: http://bostonreview.net/poetry-microreview/microreview-lyn-hejinian-my-life-nineties.
ReplyDeleteI don't love the review. Too much space is spent praising the original as a "masterpiece" and framing it in the context of Hejinian's career. He says the book requires "little introduction," but dedicating a whole sentence to that -- within the form of a microreview! -- is frustrating. I'd rather feel the potency of Hejinian's writing impacting Wood, and -- most importantly -- catalyzing the review itself.
However, Wood's understanding of the book's movement as "[revealing] the counterintuitive way time works through memory," and his subsequent mulling over temporality, is evocative, an invitation to read the book itself. He writes from the 'curtain' separating lucidity and opacity -- not quite digging into "My Life," but not brushing its surface, either.
or, rather, "specificity and ambiguity"
DeleteHey, maybe I'm using this thread incorrectly, but all of the reviews from Kenyon's micro-review column from March are excellent examples. https://www.kenyonreview.org/reviews/march-2018-micro-reviews/
ReplyDeleteReturning to Zack Anderson, I'd like to direct attention towards the 3rd paragraph of his review of Diana Morán's Reflections Next to Yr Skin, Trans. Ash Ponders:
"Despite the crystalline intensity of the poems, Ponder’s translation choices occasionally sound odd tones. For instance, the words “y,” “con,” and “tu” become “+,” “w/,” and “yr.” To some readers, decisions like these may lend a sense of punk urgency, as if the poems might be scratched into the police station wall under cover of night. However, the visual effect is frequently distracting from Morán’s breakneck turns of phrase and arresting imagery."
His analysis -- comparative, metaphorical -- is unafraid of texturing the review with the scratched surface of "the police station wall"; it's an interpretive risk Zack takes, here, and yet one he is still willing to push against in the end, and in a way that affords further acclaim ("breakneck turns of phrase" etc.). My feeling: that this tension (between the review and itself) can sit here without self-unraveling is valuable, and makes the review more dynamic, imo.
-M