Martha Ronk’s essay on Bar­bara Guest’s “Wild Gar­dens Over­looked by Night Lights,” first pub­lished in Chicago Review’s Bar­bara Guest spe­cial issue, is up for the read­ing at Poetry Daily. Here’s Ronk on Guest’s ekphrasis:

As Guest’s ekphra­sis enables a move­ment beyond what she calls “the locked king­dom of linearity,” it also sug­gests the ways in which ekphras­tic fail­ure, a fail­ure built into the very project itself, pro­duces var­i­ous sig­nif­i­cant effects. No matter the effort, a poet can never bring the visual fully into lan­guage. Yet it is ekphrasis’s very apophatic nature that has the poten­tial to unleash the unseen, the mys­te­ri­ous, the hal­lu­ci­na­tory. Ekphra­sis per­forms both impos­si­bil­ity and its over­com­ing in alter­nat­ing fashion.

Come to Hyde Park next Thurs­day (July 17th) to help us cel­e­brate the launch of Chicago Review’s new issue!

We’ll have:

+ Read­ings by Eleni Sike­lianos, Ed Rober­son, and Dan Beachy-​Quick

+ A staged read­ing of Bar­bara Guest’s “The Office”

+ Food, drinks, and music

+ Dis­counted copies of the new issue on sale

 
The party starts at 7pm on July 17th at the Exper­i­men­tal Sta­tion in Hyde Park (6100 S. Black­stone - map) and will last at least until 11pm. The event is free, but dona­tions to sup­port the mag­a­zine will be accepted. All are welcome!

Email chicago-review@uchicago.edu or leave a ques­tion in the com­ments for more information.

The Chicago Review Launch Party is co-​sponsored by the Center for Gender Stud­ies at the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago and the Writ­ing Center at the School of the Art Insti­tute. The event is sup­ported by a gen­er­ous grant from the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Arts Council.

(Photo by Fred McDarragh)

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: