"What some enlightened people attempt, from the Vanguardia to the present day, is to achieve a state of poetry in which all arts reintegrate once more. That is to say, if from one perspective we’ re talking about evolution, from another perspective we have to talk about accumulation. Stated in paradoxical form, we can affirm that in poetry and in the arts containing poetry, there is progress, and there’s no progress." Mayra López, trans. Kristin Dykstra • Chicago Review (scroll down)
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Jeffrey Yang NYRB
"During last February’s New York Fashion Week, the designer Tracy Reese had models strut to poetry readings on the catwalk. Even the insurance firm Nationwide is getting in on the trend; it recently released a series of commercials in which poets wax on about the miracle of a mortgage." Faith Hill and Karen Yuan The Atlantic
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Leontia Flynn Irish Times
"is poems were best appreciated when read aloud, allowing all those internal rhymes and well-paced rhythms to be heard. In a hotel room in Prague, I read Dialann Bóthar to my companion from start to finish, insisting he appreciate the artistry of the sounds." Ailbhe Ni Ghearbhuigh on Liam O Muirthile Irish Times
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Kate Feld The Interpreter's House
"But, for most of Western history, men cried incessantly, and mostly for themselves. In one of the first written accounts of a man crying, in the Odyssey, Odysseus is drunk, and a singer, Demodocus, is taking requests. Odysseus wants to hear the one about Odysseus—of his own adventures in the Trojan War, desperately wending his way home. Listening to someone sing of his embattled sorrows, he begins to cry. “Great Odysseus melted into tears,” Homer writes. Nothing made the man cry quite like himself. And when he finally returned home, years later, in disguise, his nurse recognized him by his weeping. His cry face was his truest self." Michael Lista • New Yorker
Victoria Chang Kenyon Review
"I have seen few photographs of the poet Jack Spicer, and none as compelling as Jonathan’ s. Spicer stands on a huge log at the bottom of a towering log pile somewhere in Mendocino County, California, in 1954. I think of him snarling on a bar stool, keeping his crew in line at the Place or some other North Beach bar. Spicer is taller in this photograph than he is in my mind’ s eye, and he has a dour expression. Perhaps he feels as out of place as he looks. Every time I look at this photograph I come away with the odd sensation that I’ m missing something, that Spicer has eluded my gaze." William Corbett Chicago Review
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GC Waldrep Yale Review
"Because of this strong rootedness in narrative and in autobiography, Levine has often been unfashionable among critics and writers with more “experimental ” sensibilities. Yet his writing, as Hirsch describes it, is “a fundamentally human-centered poetry, ” and, much more than an easily epiphanic narrative poet, Levine is a careful witness to a wide range of human experience, as evidenced, among other places, in this collection’ s many poems about travel in Europe and South America." Christopher Kempf Chicago Review
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Denise Riley Cumulus (scroll)
"Rather than simply articulating the dynamic of intimate online communication through poems that are non-complex in form and aim, post-internet poetry has the opportunity to exploit the ambivalence of cuteness. If a poem itself is tender and cute, an intimate expression of commodified subjectivity, an inadequate vehicle for politics in a marginal artform, perhaps it should also be monstrous and dangerous, looming over the streets and straining at its tethers.Within digital platforms, we are typically situated as both consumers and producers, in control and yet completely powerless: for Facebook, its users provide content for each other, whilst having their attention sold to advertisers; for Uber, its ‘partner drivers’ are able to ‘make money on [their] terms,’ whilst being managed, controlled and potentially ‘deactivated’ via the app.67 Our position is always cute; perhaps this way we retain the capacity for revenge." Lucy Burns and Charles Whalley Partisan Hotel
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