Author: Staff

Notable Books – Reviews of Carol Light, Heather Christle, Hadara Bar-Nadav and more

Published by Staff

Heaven from Steam, Carol Light (Able Muse Press, 2013) Friendship is one of the conversant pleasures of a literary life, and has rarely been reason (historically, at least) not to offer words of encouragement for a long-anticipated book. Carol Light is a friend of mine, one whose poems I’ve read, enjoyed, and argued with for years. Disclosure aside, it’s not familiarity with the poet which prompts me to report that Heaven from Steam, Light’s first book, is a keen-eyed sonic boom of a debut. It is, rather, an appreciation for the assiduous, soulful orchestration of technique that makes this book stand out. A book of days unfolding over decades, Heaven from Steam is a substantial achievement—a sometimes searing, often soaring interrogation of love and longing in all its forms—carnal and maternal, devotional and divine. Comparison with Mary Szybist’s Incarnadine, which explores similar themes in an altogether different register, is inevitable, and revealing. Each demonstrates the remarkable patience of the long view—of the gradual, focused accretion of a body of work—that I find more and more …

Kate Lebo: “Fishing for Icarus”

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“The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.  – Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs, Almost Famous But Phil, our Phil, was so cool, in that stylish, cipher-ish, miserable way that makes a man handsome, impossible, unforgettable and rich, no matter what face he was born with, no matter what was in his pockets when he died. He used English like an invented language. When we first met, he drove me to Squalicum Beach and bantered about the moon until I ran out of jokes. We sat on a log to watch the night, swimming distance from a rotten pier whose final job was to touch all the water we wouldn’t reach. Annie Dillard set her historical epic, The Living, in Bellingham. This pier could be home to one of the book’s best cruelties. Phil hadn’t yet read it. I leaned into him, studious. Later, a year after our paths stopped crossing, we shared a booth in a Bellingham bar, the one tucked into a …

Amy Glynn: “This Is Your Captain Speaking – Mary Jo Salter’s Nothing by Design “

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Nothing by Design Mary Jo Salter Knopf, 2013 — Twenty years ago, Mary Jo Salter published Sunday Skaters, a very fine collection of poems that touches on themes and ideas that longtime readers would be likely to recognize as signature preoccupations (mother-daughter dynamics, elegy, history and historical figures, images of clocks, of hands, of snow; and a delight in unexpected double meanings that arise from having heard or read something wrongly). The book includes poems about her relationships with both her mother and her (then) young children, disoriented reflections on a year spent in Iceland, lighthearted and serious contemplations on marriage, her own as well as an alternately poignant and humorously aphoristic wedding benediction for an unnamed younger couple. Around the midpoint of Sunday Skaters there’s a poem titled “Two Prayers,” set in an airplane just before takeoff. The poem is quintessential Salter: self-effacing humor, puns, malapropisms and serendipitous mishearings – and her other throughline-preoccupation: a substrate (tarmac in this case) of existential dread. Speakers in Salter’s poems, always thoughtfully observed and compellingly human, often …

Timothy Donnelly: “The Earth Itself”

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The unstoppable eccentric visionary antiquarian scholar-priest Athanasius Kircher is pretty high on my list of heroes. Born in 1601 outside the city of Fulda, not far from the geographical heart of today’s Germany, Kircher’s beautifully illustrated books on Egyptology, magnetism, acoustics, Kabbalah, numerology, volcanology and an array of other subjects exuberate over the world’s inexhaustible complexity, its baroque convolution of matter and spirit, sparing no detail as they reveal how all creation is “bound by secret knots.” In his Turris Babel, a treatise on linguistics by way of a compendium of pre-classical architecture, Kircher crunches all kinds of numbers in order demonstrate how doomed an idea the Tower of Babel was, concluding, among other things, that it would have required no fewer than 374,731,250,000,000,000 bricks to build.