Recent Posts

Reviews | April 24, 2015

Apollo in the Grass: Selected Poems, by Aleksandr Kushner

by Ian Ross Singleton

In the introduction to their forthcoming translation of Apollo in the Grass: Selected Poems, by Aleksandr Kushner, Carol Ueland and Robert Carnevale write that “translators simply have to admit that most of the music of most all lyric poetry, and most of its phenomenal presence, stay at home, in the native tongue. But ‘music of language’ is a metaphor.” Ian Singleton examines how this claim plays out in their translation of Kushner’s poetry.

Interviews | April 22, 2015

Love, Lucy / Love, Charlotte: An Interview with Charlotte Boulay

by Lucy Biederman

“I don’t think poets have a responsibility to do anything, which is the great thing about being a poet. And the competing but equally true fact is that to write good poems poets have a great number of responsibilities.”

Reviews | April 20, 2015

Spells: New and Selected Poems, by Annie Finch

by Anna Leahy

“Annie Finch’s Spells, a sweeping new and selected book, pushes readers to consider and even embrace the tradition of women’s poetry. It is no conundrum for her.”

Reviews | April 17, 2015

Plot in the Body: Yasmina Reza’s Happy are the Happy

by Jennifer Solheim

“No relationship is entirely transparent. More important, our understandings of relationships evolve and shift—knowledge dawns on us, bit by bit with new information, context, and different points of view. How two bodies interact in unseeable places and ways can tell an entire story, whether particular…or universal.”

Reviews | April 13, 2015

Mr. Mac and Me, by Esther Freud

by Ellen Prentiss Campbell

“Every character in this book works,” writes Ellen Prentiss Campbell in her review of this new book. “Among the greatest pleasures of reading this novel is Freud’s detailed and well-integrated research into the truly labor-intensive life of a seaside village in 1914.”

Interviews | April 08, 2015

Reclaiming Our Homes: An Interview with Aline Ohanesian

by Melissa Scholes Young

“I knew I wanted the book to have one foot in the past and one in the present. It was the only way to really explore the themes that interested me, namely how much impact does the past have upon our present? “

Interviews | April 06, 2015

Exit on Interview Street: A Conversation with Adam Rapp

by Brian Bartels

Adam Rapp—novelist, playwright, musician, and director—on creating scenic tension: “Asking questions about exits and entrances and trying to keep people in rooms is the ultimate goal.”

Interviews | April 03, 2015

Writing as Bricklaying: An Interview with Miriam Polli

by Donna Baier Stein

“Then you sit back one day and think, ‘Who really will care about this? It’s just another story that’s been told so many times, just in different ways.’ Yet there is that illogical reasoning, or rather lack thereof, that makes you continue.”

Interviews | April 01, 2015

With a Little Help from My Friends: An Interview with Andrea Lochen

by Rebecca Adams Wright

“All the pieces finally came together for me when I figured out what was at the heart of the novel: why Anna could see her son’s imaginary friends and what the significance of that was, both in terms of plot and theme.”

Interviews | March 30, 2015

The Project is Nothing, The Process is Everything: An Interview with Judith Claire Mitchell

by Chloe Benjamin

Chloe Benjamin speaks with her mentor and friend Judith Claire Mitchell about A Reunion of Ghosts, which took ten years to write. Mitchell says of the process, “When students are struggling with their own novels, I do understand what they’re going through and I think I’m often able to give them perspective on the nature of this massive, unwieldy, impossible enterprise that keeps them from giving up.”

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