Jedediah Berry’s “Minus, His Heart,” a short story that first appeared in Chicago Review 53:2/3, will appear in this year’s Best American Fantasy, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.
(via Mumpsimus)
I’m very pleased to announce the launch of Chicago Review 53:4 & 54:1/2, a 368-page triple issue with a special section dedicated to the life and work of Barbara Guest. The issue costs $18 and may be purchased here, or you can subscribe to CR for a year–good for three issues–for just $25 here.
The Barbara Guest feature includes three previously unpublished plays by Guest and a portfolio (edited by Catherine Wagner) of five uncollected poems. The feature also includes critical and personal responses to Guest’s work by Charles Altieri, Eileen Myles, Donald Revell, John Wilkinson, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Martha Ronk, Andrea Brady, Brenda Hillman, Nancy Robbin, Patricia Dienstfrey and Rena Rosenwasser, and Garrett Caples.
The issue also includes:
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.
Erika Staiti at saidwhatwesaid.com has put together a forbiddingly comprehensive record–236 pages at last count–of the online conversations that took place in the wake of the “Numbers Trouble” debate published in Chicago Review 52:2/3. Follow this link for the whole massive PDF, or click here for Staiti’s Editor’s Statement and Appendices.
From John Wilkinson’s fan letter-cum-review of Keston Sutherland’s “Hot White Andy,” a long poem first published in Chicago Review’s British Poetry Issue (53:1) and republished as a chapbook by Barque Press:
The present review seems to be the first of a poem I think the most remarkable poem in English published this century. Having seen the shell-shocked response of two very different audiences I am at a loss to account for the speechlessness unless we’ve been outdone in our jabber and feel abashed (I’m assuming there is some kind of operative ‘we’ about, I hope so). The poem is doing some work nonetheless. A passion for new British poetry was admitted to me more than a year after this poem had been detonated in their heads, by some graduate students on a major poetics program in the US. But given the absence of print or internet commentary, I feel compelled to write a fan letter rather than a critique, and to say a possible poetic future starts here — and if it doesn’t, I suppose I can go and grow vegetables.
I’m getting to this a little late, but The New Yorker ran a “Briefly Noted” item on C.D. Wright’s new Rising, Falling, Hovering. About the book’s “stunning” title poem, which first appeared in Chicago Review, the unsigned reviewer has this to say:
Wright weaves the strands of various narratives—a trip to Mexico, a friend’s recent illness, the speaker’s conflicts with her college-age son, her grief over the news from Iraq—into a profound meditation on our longing for common experiences. The benumbed activities of the day (“I have been to Pilates I found my old coat”) are interrupted by reports of the war’s mounting casualties: “As of three hours ago / 2,311 of our members are to remain Forever Young.”
The first part of the poem—available as a PDF here—appeared in Chicago Review 51:3; the second part appeared in CR 53:2/3, our most recent issue. Both issues are still available for sale.
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