Askold Melnyczuk’s story, “Walk With Us,” in the Massachusetts Review Casualty issue, is so skillfully turned you don’t know who the subject is until the end. At the risk of being a spoiler and softening the moment of recognition, I have to say it’s about Lynndie England, the poster girl for Abu Ghraib. But . . .
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The 2012 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Philip Metres, for his poems “Home/Front” and “Air Aria,” published in Volume 52, Issue 3/4. Philip Metres grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. He graduated from Holy Cross College in 1992, and spent the following year in Russia on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, . . .
Read MoreI drink to the people on duty, on the train, in hospitals,kitchens, hotels, on the radio, at the foundry,at sea, on a plane, on the highway,and to those who get past this night where no one calls,I drink to the next moon, to the pregnant girl,to people who make a promise, to . . .
Read MoreAnyone who’s been spending time lately at the major book fairs knows this already – about the only thing that’s sure to pack the conference rooms these days is either a book that’s got a movie contract, with celebrities attached, or a panel about e-publishing. And yet there’s no end to the . . .
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In a famous series of lectures delivered at Harvard in 1955, the philosopher James Langshaw Austin told us something everyone already knew: Language doesn’t just say things, it can also do things. In publication, the book based on these lectures took this point and ran with it. How to Do Things With . . .
Read MoreFrom the first paragraph of David Rabe’s new essay we know we are into something exact, profound, with echoes of all the great epic accounts of the human situation. Perhaps that is an overblown response: As its subtitle tells us, the piece is about prize-fighting, boxing, “the sweet science.” The temptation to cliche about . . .
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I spent last Saturday afternoon looking at naked women. Hundreds of them: dancers, prostitutes, women getting into bathtubs, women getting out of bathtubs, women combing their hair. Most of them were hanging on the walls. A few were up on pedestals or behind glass. This was, you’ve guessed, the “Degas and the . . .
Read MoreThe psychoanalyst Cathy Caruth begins her book The Wound and the Voice with a definition of trauma. Like Freud before her, Caruth finds inspiration for that definition exactly where she should – in poetry. In Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme liberata, she reminds us, the hero Tancredi mistakenly and unknowingly kills his beloved, the woman-warrior Clorinda, . . .
Read MoreIn his meditation on “Walter Benjamin’s Grave,” the anthropologist Michael Taussig observes that, “[Benjamin’s] text seem[s] to be filled with pithy statements apt for gravestones and monuments, and there is no shortage of writers who, desirous of some spectral profundity, paste in a slice or two.” To the wind with such apt . . .
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Motivational posters line the hallways en route to the visitation room. Images of rock climbers, an eagle soaring over clouds, a collection of hands of all pigmentation on a basketball, each with an inspirational one-word message: LEADERSHIP, OPPORTUNITY, ACHIEVEMENT, FOCUS, TEAMWORK. Opportunity? Achievement? The irony was almost outrageous. The hallway was in . . .
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