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:

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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.

1/ From “Writing in the Margins,” James Longenbach’s omnibus poetry review in today’s NY Times:

The strength of Amer­i­can poetry depends on the fact that hardly any­body notices it. To emerg­ing poets, eager for an audi­ence, this mar­gin­al­ity may seem frus­trat­ing, but it is the source of their free­dom. Because noth­ing is at stake except the integrity of their medium, poets may write about any­thing in any way, from deco­rously rhymed cou­plets to son­i­cally driven nonsense.

…

Through­out “Vellum,” [Matt] Dono­van con­fronts not only the power of art but also its poten­tial use­less­ness, its beauty inex­tri­ca­ble from its unnerv­ing refusal to serve.

2/ From John Wilkinson’s “Off the Grid: Lyric and Pol­i­tics in Andrea Brady’s Embrace” (first pub­lished in Chicago Review 53:1 and reprinted in Wilkinson’s new book, The Lyric Touch):

As lyric has become spe­cial­ized and dis­tin­guished from other lin­guis­tic usages, its saving grace has been per­ceived from every angle as con­nected with its resis­tance to profit, instru­men­tal­ity, and mate­r­ial progress—a per­cep­tion that echoes all the way from con­ser­v­a­tive human­ism to social­ist melior­ism, from reli­gious author­ity to new the­ol­ogy, from for­mal­ist tra­di­tion­al­ism to post-​theory, Language-​influenced poetics…. Use­less­ness is art’s use. The more art’s use­less­ness has fig­ured as an exalted reduc­tion, the more lyric poetry has been drawn toward prosodic move­ment as pri­mary, with analy­sis and argu­ment con­ducted under the aegis of this last-​ditch spirit—spirit now lodged in the ruts of lin­eation and the angles of enjamb­ment. For use­less­ness is merely status, while spirit is its work­ing afflatus….Uselessness gives rise to spirit and spirit to the ten­ta­tive sublime.

Robert Archambeau’s take on Peter Riley’s debate with John Wilkin­son in the latest issue of Chicago Review.