Who knows what he would have said,if some cold winter morning they gave himthe news he died.Maybe he’d remember having written When they say “It is Roiwho is dead?” I wonderwho will they mean? Maybe he’d’ve shrugged his shoulders and mumbled, So what?He’d’ve said, Boy, I’m a long breath singer, a cantor,I sing the Orgasmic . . .
Read MoreAs I read various accounts of Amiri Baraka’s life, one thing that I think often gets somewhat misunderstood is his early career in the bohemia of downtown New York City. Frequently, he is represented as a follower of white “beats” in a very pale environment. Of course, he did have something of . . .
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The 2014 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Geffrey Davis, for his poem, “What I Mean When I Say Farmhouse,” published in Volume 54, Issue 3. Geffrey Davis’s debut collection, Revising the Storm, was selected by Dorianne Laux for the 2013 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, and will be published by BOA Editions . . .
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Let me be more specific: by “you,” I mean us. US civilians. Fire and Forget’s “short stories from the long war” are each written by an American with intimate experience of our most recent military campaigns, and you need to read them. And, yes, “campaign” is the right word. 1) Because you don’t . . .
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Address to the Faculty Senate of the University of Massachusetts, AmherstDecember 12, 2013 When I first heard the news last Thursday that Nelson Mandela had passed away, I was listening to a lecture being presented by the writer Zadie Smith, who was on campus as a guest of the English Department. The . . .
Read MoreSome years back I served with the late Kenneth Libo—who did wonderful work as chief researcher and contributor to Irving Howe’s magisterial and indispensable World of Our Fathers—on an advisory committee for a projected documentary on Abraham Cahan, the fabled editor for fifty years of the Yiddish language Forverts. As part of his research . . .
Read MoreI have very few heroes. Who does, these days? Maybe that’s why the loss of Nelson Mandela seems to compel such reflection. Maybe it’s because another of my heroes, former US Congressman Howard Wolpe, passed away two years ago, and for me the legacies of Wolpe and Mandela are inextricably bound together. . . .
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“Witty and incisive, but insubstantial.” Somewhere someone must have a rule that says never begin a review by citing another review. And yet here I simply can’t resist, in part because the Kirkus Review’s final word on Tabish Khair’s brilliant new book, How to Fight Islamic Terror from the Missionary Position, explicitly retreads its earlier . . .
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A Review of Benjamin Hollander’s In The House Un-American It would be one thing if not fitting in in America were something clear. For Puerto Rican Jew Carlos ben Carlos Rossman—the main character in Benjamin Hollander’s new book In The House Un-American—if not fitting in were something he could put his finger on, he . . .
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I discovered Anselm Kiefer around the same time as I saw Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire and I’ve been occasionally obsessed with both ever since. Kiefer and Wenders are linked in my mind not only by the accident of timing but also by angels; Wings of Desire follows an angel who tires of consoling the spirits . . .
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