Shane McCrae is the rare poet who can write a poem that is cool, easygoing, and deep—often all at once. He uses conversational language, casual references to pop culture, and slang as though he were talking to a circle of friends. With this mixture, he makes some of the most heartfelt new poems being written, offering a piercing rendition of how a truly contemporary consciousness—and conscience—deals with the ugliness of contemporary America, as well as with the old-fashioned human condition.

IT’S NOT MONDAYS YOU HATE, IT’S YOUR JOB

“At times I’ve thought to myself maybe I have been mad since I was three just as my mother says, and someday if I recover my sanity the phantom tormenting me I call a certain party will disappear.” So says the hospital-bed-ridden narrator of Kenzaburo Oe’s 1972 novella The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away. The amorphous label “a certain party,” ginned up by the narrator’s mother to describe his father—a troubling, enigmatic man, presumably dead—is intended to neutralize and debase him by not naming him. It turns him, in the eyes of the narrator, into “an imaginary

In a recent T: The New York Times Style Magazine story extolling the virtues of boxing films (classic and contemporary), Benjamin Nugent points out that every example of the genre involves a comeback, against all odds. The protagonist pulls off an upset victory in the ring and lives to fight another day.

A golden girl in the Golden State, Eve Babitz, the daughter of a well-regarded Hollywood studio musician and goddaughter to Stravinsky, was seen—in all the places you go to be seen in Los Angeles—before she was heard. Her first book, the glossy, memoiristic essay collection Eve’s Hollywood (1972; reissued by NYRB Classics, $18), published when she was twenty-eight, remains Babitz’s most-read work, and the hardcover edition has long been a coveted coffee-table prop. Its jacket boasts an Annie Leibovitz photograph of a busty Babitz lounging in a black bikini and feather boa, proof that the silky avatar of this “confessional

Early in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, a young man obsessed with suicide proposes a thought experiment: “Imagine a stone the size of a big house; it’s hanging there, and you are under it; if it falls on you, on your head—will it be painful?” That speculation never seems far from the mind of the great Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902–87). Much of Drummond’s work—from the crystalline verse he assembled in career-making collections like Feeling of the World (1940), José (1942), and Rose of the People (1945) to the blustery, sometimes turgid material he produced further into his middle age

Nations, like political creeds, can be upbeat or downbeat. Along with North Korea, the United States is one of the few countries on earth in which optimism is almost a state ideology. For large sectors of the nation, to be bullish is to be patriotic, while negativity is a species of thought crime. Pessimism is thought to be vaguely subversive. Even in the most despondent of times, a collective fantasy of omnipotence and infinity continues to haunt the national unconscious. It would be almost as impossible to elect a US president who advised the nation that its best days were

The very title of this novel announces a departure for Matt Bell. Scrapper—with its homely brevity and flat vowels—stands in striking contrast to the Biblical roll of Bell’s 2013 In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods. So too, more substantial elements in the new book reveal that its young author is going for something different. The house and lake of the previous novel had no fixed address, unfolding in a nightmare. But Scrapper at once places us in contemporary Detroit, “fifty years an American wreck.” A handful of chapters visit elsewhere, but the stay is

The seductive cover of JEFF KOONS: A RETROSPECTIVE (Whitney Museum/Yale, $65) is a printing tour de force: no title, just an embossed rendition of the 1991 polychromed wood sculpture Large Vase of Flowers. Open petals reveal what appear to be the tops of enticing (yet unsavory) muffins, simultaneously erotic and excremental. Koons himself describes the flowers as “very sexual and fertile,” adding, “at the same time they are 140 assholes.” The work is like a dirty joke on Georgia O’Keeffe. Demonstrating Koons’s deft employment of technically demanding, impersonal manufacturing processes, the cover was printed on a cast, coated sheet, using

Saint Etienne is a long-standing London-based pop group, founded in the late ’80s by two pop writers turned musicians, merging post-punk fanzine culture and the rave idyll. Its sound is a self-consciously cosmopolitan mix of acid house, folk, blue-eyed soul, Parisian yé-yé, and CinemaScope sound tracks; charismatic blond vocalist Sarah Cracknell evokes soft-edged 1960s UK singers such as Dusty Springfield and the early Bee Gees. A few singles (“You’re in a Bad Way,” “He’s on the Phone”) nudged the UK Top 10 in 1995. But since none of the band’s Euro-cool influences carried remotely the same cachet across the Atlantic,