October 11, 2023 A Letter from the Editor A Fall Dispatch from the Review’s Poetry Editor By Srikanth Reddy Detail from the cover art of issue no. 245, Joeun Kim Aatchim’s Piggyback (Amused), 2019. Among the numerous accolades I received as a high school student was the honorific, awarded by the Hinsdale Central class of ’95, of worst driver. There’s something about cars, and driving culture at large, that’s never wholly agreed with me. Even now, when an Infiniti cuts me off on the freeway, I’m tempted to ram it in the name of eternity and of all language art. Nevertheless, Olivia Sokolowski’s racy poem “Lover of Cars,” published in the new Fall issue of the Review, came to me as a revelation—a revved-up paean to “all those Stingers Jaguars Tiguans Fiat 500s / and San Remo Green Beemer i4s” in the showroom of the author’s imagination: I want to wrap my face tight with a silk scarf and spiral down a Cinque Terre highway in an Alfa Romeo the color of my innerlip I want to slip deep as a splinter in a black Countach What I love most about this swerving verse is how Sokolowski taps the brakes on her own autoerotic fantasy (“but that’s for when I graduate / from Honda Girl”). “Lover of Cars” made me wonder if the same hapless instructor at Hinsdale Central taught us both driver’s ed and sex ed for a good reason—the point of each course being to prevent a life-altering accident. You can learn more about how “Lover of Cars” came down the assembly line in this month’s Making of a Poem; it makes me wish Infiniti or Honda would name a vehicle after Sokolowski’s poetic alter ego, Olivia+. In fact, any number of our Fall issue contributors could have an automobile named in their honor. The Bei Dao would make a revolutionary electric vehicle; we hope you’ll feel as transported as we were by our extended excerpt from the author’s long-awaited poetic autobiography, propulsively translated from the Chinese by Jeffrey Yang. And it’s easy to imagine packing the family into a Jolanda Insana for a long weekend; as the late poet writes, in Catherine Theis’s plucky translation from the Italian, “the streets of the sublime are endless.” The de la Torre and the Tanaka, too, sound like high-performance vehicles. Not that all poems have to be GTI. Nora Claire Miller’s “Rumor” is more likely to derail you, while Katana Smith’s poetic still life “& Nothing Happens” stops time altogether; D. A. Powell’s “As for What the Rain Can Do” shows how poetry and weather can “turn on a dime.” At the risk of driving my extended metaphor too far, I can’t resist ending with a little story about poetry and cars. The Ford Motor Company once invited Marianne Moore to float possible names for a new sedan. Ford ultimately rejected all of Moore’s suggestions tout court, including the Bullet Lavolta, the Intelligent Whale, the Mongoose Civique, and the Utopian Turtletop, but I’d take any of her recommendations over the marketing department’s choice: the Edsel. Srikanth Reddy is the Review‘s poetry editor.
September 12, 2023 A Letter from the Editor Announcing Our Fall Issue By Emily Stokes Sometimes, as the Review’s print deadline looms, I catch myself fantasizing about a return to university life. I should clarify that, in this fantasy, “university” is a quiet, spartan room, with a bed, an armchair, and a constant supply of paperback classics. It is entirely lacking in lectures, academic conferences, or tenure-track infighting, and also bears no resemblance to my actual experience as an undergraduate: a fog of nervous smoking, romantic dysfunction, and tearful struggles to conjure up an essay on, say, doorframes in the work of Henry James. Sadly, there is, to my knowledge, no program or job at which reading is the sole responsibility—and, of course, nothing complicates a love of books like the attempt to build a life around them. Not one but two pieces in our new Fall issue suggest, for instance, that even too much Shakespeare can have side effects: in Rosalind Brown’s “A Narrow Room,” a conscientious student on deadline for an essay about the Sonnets finds herself continually waylaid by an erotic triangle of her own invention, while Ishion Hutchinson recalls his undoing as a homesick sophomore alone in a windowless yellow closet in Kingston, Jamaica, obsessing over local folklore, Crime and Punishment, and Hamlet. And in Munir Hachemi’s rollicking “Living Things,” translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches, four arrogant, well-read young men spend the summer after graduation working in the South of France, searching for that “hazy, ill-defined thing that we coined experience,” only to find that their education has in no way prepared them for the outside world, with its onslaught of corruption, exploitation, and force-fed chickens. Read More
June 28, 2023 A Letter from the Editor A Summer Dispatch from the Review’s Poetry Editor By Srikanth Reddy Detail from the cover art of issue no. 244: Emilie Louise Gossiaux, London with Ribbon, 2022, ballpoint pen on paper. There’s a thrill of eros to many summer poems. Like in those late-eighties teen movies—Dirty Dancing, Say Anything, One Crazy Summer—you never know when you’ll see some skin. And so it goes in our new Summer issue. In Jessica Laser’s dreamy, autobiographical remembrance “Kings,” the poet recalls a drinking game she used to play in high school on the shore of Lake Michigan over summer vacations: … You never knew whether it would be strip or not, so you always considered wearing layers. It was summer. Sometimes you’d get pretty naked but it wasn’t pushy. You could take off one sock at a time. Read More
June 6, 2023 A Letter from the Editor Announcing Our Summer Issue By Emily Stokes Not long ago, during a spring clean, I came across one of the dozen or so notebooks in which I’d been keeping a diary back in 2020, and found myself sitting on the floor to read. I was expecting the writing to be disappointing (it was) and that I’d feel a mixture of embarrassment and exasperation at my repetitive thought patterns (I did). I was more surprised to realize that, having faithfully kept a near-daily record of my life during one of the most eventful periods in recent American history, what I’d written was almost exclusively about cars, and my monthslong efforts to buy one. “B. offered to drive me to see the Yaris,” a typical passage begins. “I brought water, pears, chocolate, cigs. Talked about cars all the way. He seemed subdued.” Another entry, in an apparently unconscious tribute to Daphne du Maurier, opens: “Last night I got into Volvo C30s again.” There are accounts of test drives: “Driving the automatic: never quite being able to tell if it is off or just v. quiet.” And moments of reflection: “S. sent me a picture of his pickup and many planks of wood. Jealous of male agency.” And then, in the middle of one September entry: “Mum asked if I had spoken to shrink about the car issue.” Read More
May 11, 2023 A Letter from the Editor A Spring Dispatch from the Review’s Poetry Editor By Srikanth Reddy Illustration by Na Kim. Sometimes, on the campus of the university where I work, a visiting writer will explain to a captive audience how great poems—more often than not his own—get written. These explanations often sound a bit mystical, occasionally even mystifying. So I was amused to read the opening lines of Dobby Gibson’s tongue-in-cheek “Small Craft Talk,” a poem our readers discovered in a box of paper slush, and which you’ll find in our Spring issue: In some languages the word for dream is the same as for music is the kind of thing poets like to say Before you know it, Gibson’s takedown of writing-program clichés shades into a wonder at how poems can make us feel ourselves, as Wallace Stevens once put it, “more truly and more strange”: as if you’re hearing the song of your own mind sung into being so that you become yourself by becoming more like another self Read More
March 21, 2023 A Letter from the Editor Announcing Our Seventieth-Anniversary Issue By Emily Stokes A few days before the Review’s new Spring issue went to print, the poet Rita Dove called me from her Charlottesville home to set a few facts straight. She and her husband, the German novelist Fred Viebahn, are night owls—emails from Dove often land around 9 A.M., just before bedtime—and they had just spent several long nights poring over her interview, which was conducted by Kevin Young and which spans Dove’s childhood in Akron, Ohio, where her father was the first Black chemist at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company; her adventures with the German language; her experience as poet laureate of the United States, between 1993 and 1995; and her love of ballroom dancing and of sewing, during which she might “find the solution for an enjambment” halfway through stitching a seam. Working their way through the conversation, she and Viebahn had confirmed or emended the kinds of small but crucial details that are also the material of Dove’s poems: the number of siblings in her father’s family, the color of the book that inspired the poem “Parsley,” the name of the German lettering in which her childhood copy of Friedrich Schiller’s Das Lied von der Glocke was printed (not Sütterlin, it transpired, but Fraktur). We talked through her corrections, and then Dove produced a final fact that caught me by surprise. Two decades ago, she said, she had been preparing to be interviewed for The Paris Review by George Plimpton. He’d called to set a date for their first conversation, and the next day, she said, came the shocking news that he had died. Read More