In lieu of orig­i­nal thought, a few items of pos­si­ble interest:

+ John Conroy is back! But he’s on WBEZ now instead of writ­ing for the Chicago Reader. (This is not exactly news, but a story today–not up yet on the WBEZ web­site–reminded me to men­tion it.)

+ Emily Wilson (the clas­si­cist, not the poet) reviews John Tipton’s Ajax: “He suc­ceeds bril­liantly at cre­at­ing a living, con­tem­po­rary Sopho­cles. His ver­sion is a chill­ing mirror.” (The original’s in The Nation, but trapped behind a paywall.)

+ Marty Riker inter­views the Flood fel­lows: “Just for the record, I was not, in fact, an angry young man. Con­fused and obnox­ious, but not really angry.”

+ Auf­gabe’s edi­tors undo “Numbers Trouble”: “Should we be thank­ful or irri­tated that the draft is gendered?”

+ Danielle Allen speaks for her­self on the Obama Muslim smear: “Worse than mud.”

+ Kent John­son is still not sure about “A True Account of Talk­ing to the Sun at Fire Island”: “‘It is a real mys­tery, that poem.’”

This week’s Publisher’s Weekly turns a wel­come spot­light on Jeff Clark, the designer respon­si­ble for some of the truly remark­able book covers that have appeared over the last few years, from Matthew Rohrer’s Rise Up (Wave Books) to Hannah Weiner’s Open House (Ken­ning Edi­tions) to Jonathan Bate’s biog­ra­phy and selected poems of John Clare (FSG). Jeff’s work is every­where these days; besides being design direc­tor for Flood Edi­tions—which has not one but two books of poetry up for an NBCC award this year—he designs for Ahsahta Press, Wave Books, and Essay Press, among many others. He also designed every Chicago Review cover between the Ed Dorn spe­cial issue (50:2/3/4) and our latest issue (53:2/3).

This week’s New York Times Book Review fea­tures a number of books that have appeared here­abouts in the last couple of months:

+ Guy Martin reviews Patrick Symmes’s The Boys from Dolores, call­ing it “a mas­terly account of Cuba’s pathology” and “a rich, per­sonal, metic­u­lous, deeply lay­ered work of nar­ra­tive journalism.” Follow the linked title for more reviews.

+ Ben­jamin M. Fried­man reviews Gre­gory Clark’s A Farewell to Arms. Fried­man seems attracted to Clark’s genetic hypoth­e­sis even though he can’t find much evi­dence for it:

One frus­trat­ing aspect of Clark’s argu­ment is that while he insists on the “biological basis” of the mech­a­nism by which the sur­vival of the rich­est fos­tered new human attrib­utes and insists on the Dar­win­ian nature of this process, he repeat­edly shies away from saying whether the changes he has in mind are actu­ally genetic…. Nor does he intro­duce any evi­dence, of the kind that nor­mally lies at the core of such debates, that traits like the capac­ity for hard work are her­i­ta­ble in the sense in which biol­o­gists use the term.

Click here for my pre­lim­i­nary take on Clark’s argu­ment, which Ken Sil­ver­stein men­tioned favor­ably on his Harper’s blog.

+ David Orr reviews Michael O’Brien’s Sleep­ing and Waking, which he describes as “a qui­etly star­tling col­lec­tion that ought to earn O’Brien not only poetry-​world atten­tion, but actual readers.”
[Read more]

Joshua Kotin’s letter to the New York Times Book Review. Kotin men­tions Flood Edi­tions, LVNG, Ugly Duck­ling Presse, Cir­cum­fer­ence, Atelos, and Ham­bone. For more poetry that doesn’t require the bene­fac­tions of Eli Lilly and S.I. New­house, check out Omnidawn, Sleep­ing­Fish, NO: A Jour­nal of the Arts, and our British friends Barque Press and Object Permanence.