Blog

Not Communication, Communion

April 23, 2016 - By Michael Thurston

A Review of Save Twilight: Selected Poems. New and expanded edition, by Julio Cortázar, Translated by Stephen Kessler. (City Lights, 2016).

In “Axolotl,” an early short story by Julio Cortázar, the protagonist watches the titular amphibians very closely, day after day, imagining his way into their consciousness (or lack of consciousness), taking up the point of view from inside the aquarium, until, as a consequence of this attention, he finds himself suddenly looking out...

The Continuous Conversation

April 11, 2016 - By Maryam Zehtabi Sabeti Moqaddam

A Review of The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible, by Aviya Kushner (Spiegel & Grau, 2015).

After two years in Jerusalem as a financial journalist and travel columnist during the second Intifada, Aviya Kushner returned to the United States in 2002 to enroll in the MFA program at the University of Iowa, seeking the safety and luxury of reading as a student. Before the long drive from her New York hometown to Iowa City, the only directions she had received was written on a small sheet of paper: the name of someone that two poet friends had told her to look up—Marilynne Robinson. Professor Robinson’s class on the Bible in English would forever change the course of Kushner’s life and career.

Growing up in a Hebrew-...

Read Like a Rabbi

April 11, 2016 - By Andrés Amitai Wilson

A Review of The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible, by Aviya Kushner (Spiegel and Grau, 2015).

Pirkei Avot (“The Chapters of Our Fathers”), a compendium of rabbinic ethical aphorisms, includes  Ben Bag Bag’s prescription for studying Torah: “Turn the Torah over—turn it over for everything is in it. See into it, grow old and worn over it and from it never turn away, for you will not find a better portion than it.” Jewish tradition encourages a reverent grappling with its sacred texts, and the concept of “Torah” is itself elastic. Literally “teaching” or “instruction,” Torah is also the unifying heading of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible,...

Addio, Gian Maria Testa, Stationmaster

April 3, 2016 - By Gabriele Ferraris

“Working for the railroad suited me. I was comfortable there; it was a supportive environment. I always liked my job. I began working for the railroad on April 1, 1982, and I...

Something Like a Manifesto

February 26, 2016 - By Michael Thurston

A Review of Donna Stonecipher's Model City (Shearsman, 2015). 

How many poets are there in the world that you go looking for online, checking regularly, even impatiently, to see whether and when their new books will be out? Not many. Among the poets whose work I anxiously...