culture October 11, 2011

Dorothea Tanning at MoMA

The crowd that filled the auditorium at the Museum of Modern Art earlier this month twinkled with eccentric glasses and necklaces. Most hair was gray or graying; viewing audience members’ heads from an auditorium perch was a little like gazing down at a cloud from an airplane window. Their color suited the occasion: we had gathered to celebrate the life of Dorothea Tanning, a surrealist poet and painter who turned 101 over the summer.

The crowd that filled the auditorium at the Museum of Modern Art earlier this month twinkled with eccentric glasses and necklaces. Most hair was gray or graying; viewing audience members’ heads from an auditorium perch was a little like gazing down at a cloud from an airplane window. Their color suited the occasion: we had gathered to celebrate the life of Dorothea Tanning, a surrealist poet and painter who turned 101 over the summer.

Best known for her early surrealist paintings, which hang in the Tate Modern, the Pompidou, the MoMA, and other museums, Tanning is also a noteworthy poet.

culture July 07, 2010

Death Is Not an Option by Suzanne Rivecca

Death Is Not an Option, Suzanne Rivecca’s lively, often lovely debut collection, explores how the blind lead the blind. In the tender story “It Sounds Like You’re Feeling,” a blind counselor with a guide dog makes a patient wonder what would happen if the canine lost his vision: “Would another, smaller creature be assigned to it, something with excellent eyesight, a trained raptor maybe, that would lead the way with the dog behind it and [the counselor] behind the dog, the caravan growing and growing as they all aged and deteriorated, on and on like a series of Russian nesting dolls?”

The

culture December 10, 2009

The Evolution of Shadows by Jason Quinn Malott

Jason Quinn Malott’s debut, The Evolution of Shadows, is a devastating, often dizzying novel of returns and turnarounds. Years after war photographer Gray Banick vanishes in Bosnia, his American, English, and Bosnian friends convene in Sarajevo to solve the mystery of his disappearance, a venture that sends them traveling around the country, seeking hints of him or his remains. Malott’s characters rarely stay in a single timeframe—or a single place—for long: they slip frequently into recollections of lovers and dinners and battles past, making their experience of the present seem just as bumpy,

culture August 13, 2009

Romanticism by April Bernard

In a 1998 essay recently reprinted in his book Close Calls with Nonsense, critic Stephen Burt christened the “Elliptical school” of poetry, which encompasses writers prone to “hinting, punning, or swerving away from a never-quite-unfolded backstory,” who “believe provisionally in identities (in one—or in at least one—‘I’ per poem),” but who, amid their “fast-forward and cut-up,” “suspect the I's they invoke." He grants only an elliptical mention to April Bernard, noting that he wishes he had room to quote her first volume, Blackbird Bye-Bye (1989). That book embraces a rhetoric of zig-zags,

Abigail Deutsch