“I have been wrong before, god of syntax / and understatement, god of slips in silk / and polyester, god of the laboratory, god of newsprint / and sunscreen”

The layered surface cascades into itself as quickly as it interrupts itself. It vibrates like a field of electricity, full of chaos and psychedelic apparitions, and yet is held together by an arresting unity which appears to emerge at once from above and below — that is, it appears as calculated as it does spontaneous.

Sofia Coppola doesn't seem to work so much with “the female gaze,” whatever that might mean. She doesn't watch women so much as she watches men watching women.

After a century of deafness to the task and ambition of music, composers may need to relearn how to learn before Schumann’s words can even begin to make sense. How can the music of the past free the music of the present?

For Anvil and Rose 12, Inspector Watt returns with reviews of books from Paul Celan (tr. Pierre Joris), Jean Daive (on Celan), Alen Hamza, Lara Mimosa Montes, and a COVID anthology edited by Alice Quinn.

Jack’s poetry asks you, the reader, to abandon yourself, to engage with what you don’t know, and can’t understand, and enter a path of transformative gnosis.

In this latest Anvil and Rose, Herman Van den Reeck reviews books from Rosebud Ben-Oni, Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley, Andres Cerpa, Andrew Levy, and Jackie Wang.

The experience is absolute; a demonstration is made of the presence of an incomplete reality to which its image is opposed by the intervention of a motor element condensing the real and the virtual into a superior unity.

Every year in April I am reminded of two monumental poetic works which begin with the Earth’s springtime renewal: The Canterbury Tales from 1400 and The Waste Land from 1922. 

In this latest Anvil and Rose, Inspector Watt reviews books by Agustín Guambo, David Lehman, J. Michael Martinez, Maureen N. McLane, and Chelsey Minnis.

Adam Morris reviews Padma Viswanathan’s new translation of São Bernardo by Graciliano Ramos. “The novel is at once a merciless satire of social class in postcolonial Brazil, and a sensitivity reader’s worst nightmare.“

Helen Adam is a singular luminary whose ballads, if you read them out loud and late at night, will sneak into your mind and create phantasmagorias of exquisite, sensual, brooding, and melancholy fairy-tales.

Joe Safdie hits two bird with one stone reviewing Ammiel Alcalay’s A Bibliography for After Jews and Arabs and his forthcoming Ghost Talk.

Herman Van den Reeck returns for 5 lightning reviews of books by Justin Phillip Reed, Lana Del Rey, Maria Dahvana Headley, Eliza Griswold, and Norman Finkelstein.

‘Song. Sang Freud. Spread on the chalcedony, a land there is no title to.’ And where is that? …

The artist Tom Leaver is a painter who dons rubber gloves, dips his fingertips into the palette, and spreads gestures across the canvas. To him, it is an act of meditation, the procession of time throughout a day distilled into an image.

El arte modernista para Trotsky no podía ser considerado como una nueva cultura sino más bien como una expresión de la tarea y demanda de trascender la sociedad y cultura burguesas.

The wish to avoid the difficulties of attempting to reproduce Valéry’s own rhyme and scansion is understandable, but replacing them with another set of procedural impositions doesn’t necessarily allow the translation to do justice to the original.

Every word of this book is Angel, ἄγγελος, the potently vitaminal vessel through which eternity manifests as dilatory consciousness in this world.

In a new twist on the Anvil and Rose column, Inspector Watt reviews the reviews of Dwight Garner.