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.

I’ve posted some photos from last Thursday’s Chicago Review launch party. The event featured a set of tremendous readings by Eleni Sikelianos, Ed Roberson, and Dan Beachy-Quick, as well as a brilliant performance of Barbara Guest’s “The Office” directed by Peter Thomas.

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)

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The Barbara Guest feature includes three previously unpublished plays by Guest and a portfolio (edited by Catherine Wagner) of five uncollected poems.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:

(more…)

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.