For those who get their daily dig­i­tal emu­nc­tion via RSS: Camp­bell McGrath and I have been dis­cussing my Book­fo­rum review of his Seven Note­books in the com­ments sec­tion of my last post. (And here you thought the “Tenzone” was exciting…)

My review of Camp­bell McGrath’s Seven Note­books appears in the summer issue of Book­fo­rum. Check it out…

A few days ago at Isola di Rifiuti, John Latta named C.D. Wright’s “Rising, Falling, Hovering” “the most ambi­tious U.S. anti-​war poem of the bloom­ing idi­otic twenty-​first century.”

Latta being Latta, that praise—and I don’t think it’s ten­den­tious to take it as such—is asserted only after he’s com­pleted his shift of crit­i­cal heavy lift­ing, here cen­tered on the con­nec­tion between the two halves of the poem. (Which, dear reader, I beg for­bear­ance to repeat were first pub­lished in Chicago Review 51:3 and 53:2/3.) Latta writes:

The move­ment between “Rising, Falling, Hov­er­ing” and “Rising, Falling, Hov­er­ing, / cont.” is one of refus­ing surcease, increased con­cern, anger unabated and rising. (Indeed, one fully expects the poem to con­tinue for­ever with purer and purer distill’d rage, dog­ging the “end­less war” sce­nario of the crim­i­nal U.S. policy-​makers.) If the “cont.” story wor­ries about a son trav­el­ing unaccompany’d in Mexico and about tend­ing to a friend’s “bad diag­no­sis” and appar­ent cancer treat­ment in Mexico City (jux­ta­posed against—on the flight down: “The mon­i­tor from the over­head / begins its info­tain­ment Not shown: white phos­pho­rous falling / on the city of minarets”), thus seem­ing to focus in, off the high civic stakes of its beginnings—too, it ends by bray­ing out a mag­nif­i­cent curse…

Latta’s review gives me occa­sion to men­tion that the forth­com­ing issue of CR, due back from the press in a few weeks, includes C.D. Wright’s own take on the poem, an auto­com­men­tary some­what along the lines of the expli­ca­tion de soi-même that John Matthias under­took for CR 52:2/3/4.

Ecce Mon­strum, Jeremy Biles’s study of Georges Bataille, got a nice review by Tomasz Swo­boda over at H-Ideas recently. Here’s the upshot:

All in all, among recent stud­ies on Bataille, Biles’s book is the one that per­haps approaches best Bataille’s thought while propos­ing new inter­pre­ta­tions of his work. Indeed, read­ers who are not famil­iar with Bataille’s work will be rather well intro­duced to its main aspects. At the same time, spe­cial­ized read­ers will find in Biles’s book refor­mu­la­tions and rein­ter­pre­ta­tions that will likely become piv­otal in Batail­lean studies.

The book came out with Ford­ham Uni­ver­sity Press last year and is avail­able for pur­chase (at an awfully steep $65) here.