Innholdsfortegnelse for February 9, 2023 i The New York Review of Books

Neal Ascherson is the author of Black Sea, Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland, and the novel Death of the Fronsac, among other books. He is an Honorary Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. Marianne Boruch is eleventh book of poems, Bestiary Dark, was published in 2021. Caleb Crain is the author of the novels Necessary Errors and Overthrow and the critical study American Sympathy. Ben Fountain is most recent book is Beautiful Country Burn Again. His novel Devil Makes Three will be published in September. Ian Frazier is the author of thirteen books, including Great Plains, Family, On the Rez, and Travels in Siberia. Coco Fusco is a New York City–based artist and the author of Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba. Linda Greenhouse teaches at…

Matisse: The Red Studio an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, May 1–September 10, 2022; and SMK–National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, October 13, 2022–February 26, 2023. Catalog of the exhibition by Ann Temkin and Dorthe Aagesen. Museum of Modern Art/SMK–National Gallery of Denmark, 223 pp., $55.00 Matisse in the 1930s an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, October 20, 2022–January 29, 2023; the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, March 1–May 29, 2023; and the Musée Matisse Nice, June 23–September 24, 2023. Catalog of the exhibition by Matthew Affron, Cécile Debray, Claudine Grammont, and others. Philadelphia Museum of Art/Musée de l’Orangerie/RMN–Grand Palais/Yale University Press, 255 pp., $50.00 Over the years I’ve had conversations with friends, often artists, who tell me they much prefer Bonnard to Matisse and…

The Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism Parul Sehgal, a staff writer at The New Yorker, was previously a book critic at The New York Times, where she also worked as a senior editor and columnist. “Parul Sehgal is by now widely recognized for the exquisite discernment and disarming tact with which she confronts received notions and stale trends in the literary marketplace,” the judges said. “But it is her attention to the word on the page—her love of language—that elevates her criticism into something like art. Sentence by sentence, she exemplifies the virtues of subtlety, surprise, and above all, pleasure. She is a guide to reading jouissance from the smallest of units—the word, the phrase, the sentence—to the largest: character, perspective, revelation.” Ryan Ruby is the author of…

In the afternoon four black-throated bluesTossed themselves up from the pavement at nothing.At the rain. And having made a surgeon take backHis stitches early, I lifted my phoneBeyond the shelter of my unsteady umbrellaAnd tapped at their cursive capital Gs.Suddenly I felt ashamed. You could seeI had nothing better to do. I stopped. Four in the morning. Fill the kettle by touch.Floof the gas. Unpick the bandageTo look, though water does boil watched.We can’t not solve the problem.The sky facing the birds and me had glaredLike undeveloped photo paper.Find a voice to sing against the voiceThat doesn’t answer when asked why not.…

The Unfolding by A. M. Homes. Viking, 396 pp., $28.00 Poor Big Guy. When we meet him at the start of A. M. Homes’s novel The Unfolding, his candidate for president has just lost, his alcoholic wife seems to hate him, and his sweet, doting daughter is starting to suspect he’s a jerk. It’s election night, 2008, and he’s at the bar of the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, headquarters of the freshly defeated Mc-Cain campaign, drinking four different kinds of fancy scotch and making notes on cocktail napkins for, as he confides to a new friend, “a forced correction.” All evening he’s been telling himself, “This can’t happen here,” but what’s the “this” that’s freaking him out? Certainly not the election of a Democrat; that’s happened many times. What’s different…

Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho. Viking, 275 pp., $26.00; $17.00 (paper) Virginia Woolf famously complained that there were too few novels about women’s “relationships” with other women. Her point, which has its own chapter in A Room of One’s Own (1929), is that plots involving women have, “almost without exception,” hung on their ties to men. She imagines taking a new novel off the shelf at random, by a debut author she names Mary Carmichael, to see what might have changed now that more women are writing: To begin with, I ran my eye up and down the page. I am going to get the hang of her sentences first, I said, before I load my memory with blue eyes and brown and the relationship that there may…

Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It by Tom Philpott. Bloomsbury, 246 pp., $28.00; $17.00 (paper) The Farmer’s Lawyer: The North Dakota Nine and the Fight to Save the Family Farm by Sarah Vogel. Bloomsbury, 407 pp., $28.00 We are eating a big hole in the middle of the Midwest and sucking up California’s ancient aquifers until the land collapses like an empty juice box. The awe that new arrivals from other countries feel when they see the bounty in a US supermarket is an illusion—more like what one might experience when stepping from a cold night into a nice, warm house where they’re burning the furniture. In short, we are plundering the natural sources of our food production and can’t go on…

Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems by Dionne Brand. Duke University Press, 619 pp., $29.95 Dionne Brand is well represented by Nomenclature, a collection of eight volumes of her poetry accompanied by an important new work. Beginning with Primitive Offensive (1982) and ending with Ossuaries (2010), the book confirms that Brand has always been a meticulous but dynamic stylist for whom form is motivated by the desire to take “history’s pulse …with another hand”—to replace orthodox understandings of time and place with an art that speaks “the whole immaculate language of the ravaged world.” It’s an ambition that has gradually drawn her away from the more oracular, incantatory mode of her earlier work toward sharp, selfdirected poems that are as rooted in the details of everyday life as in the abstractions…

So the road welcomed the ice. And the ice lay down.Water the bulk of everyblood cell already. Solidarity, sister!When spring comes we take notice afterwinter’s long fierce sloppy drives through winter.Spring is a forgiveness,a forgetfulness. That old saw—60 percent of us soakedor drunk silly with water?I mean, water! friend for life.At a phone in a public booth once, wherea friend passed out, he whowe rushed to the ER…. They hooked himto a glistening bottle, hung it highto fill him back up.Dehydration, no biggie but good thingyou brought him here, the one in mint greenwith a selfie ID said before therewere selfies. You should flood yourselves too,she advised—to the brim! I picturedan ankle’s worthdown there, the drip method,a welling up. Water in the human eye isthis or that percent and I’d…

Mina Loy: Apology of Genius by Mary Ann Caws. Reaktion, 223 pp., $27.50 Between 1949 and 1953 Mina Loy was a well-known character around the Bowery, a ghostly figure in white face powder and a wine-red dressing gown, prowling the streets and poking into trash cans for detritus to squirrel away in her single room in a communal household on Stanton Street. Her poetry was out of print and most of her friends were dead or distant. To her homeless neighbors, whom she often paid to run her errands, she was known as the Duchess. Her student housemates, who loved to listen to her stories, knew that she had once lived in Paris and achieved renown as a poet and artist, that she had been married to a man she called…

To the Editors: In “A Dream of a Great Burning” [NYR, December 22, 2022], Tobi Haslett’s long look at the writing career of John Edgar Wideman, there is much to value. From the jump, Haslett frames Wideman true: “a black intellectual—full of grandeur and agony, rage and poise.” Yet in some fundamental way Haslett misses that Wideman is a great writer of heart and beauty, not just pathos—at bottom, Wideman is a craftsman who brings far more to his writing than the tragedies of his life. Let me put it like this: Haslett’s essay suffers when he tries to explain art through a superficial examination of the author’s life. Instead of belaboring the point, I’ll center my own criticism on a paragraph that I find offensive and demeaning and beneath…