“You see this truculent character here, with the curly hair and mustache?” Picasso asked about the Vollard Suite, “That’s Rembrandt. Or maybe it’s Balzac; I’m not sure. It’s a compromise, I suppose. It doesn’t really matter. They’re only two of the people to haunt me. Every human being is a whole colony.”

When I died — a long time ago — I was buried with wolf-fangs and transistor radio. While brain festered in my skull, I pondered negative numbers and the mess I had left: bills, some jottings reminding me to return a phone call from the black side of the sun.

The wind howls against the trailer’s tin walls. 

“You’re not special,” he says. “You’re not the main character.”

Then who is? But he doesn’t read fiction.

The two standpoints that Lin has employed in his work, detached nihilism and eclectic mysticism, have been hallmarks of various countercultural strands that, since the 19th century, have tried to deal with the death of God and the crisis of modernity.

There’s this TikTok trend my roommate told me about. You’re supposed to open the book on your nightstand to page 30 and read the first line. Apparently it describes your love life. Murder Suey is the book on my nightstand. In Murder Suey, page 30 is blank.

We seek to utilize the force of our creative ability to fashion a world of our own or thereby change that which is given.

Better a handful / of calm than / two of clutching / at the wind….

“Imagine an encounter that goes unreported by language.”

“The visitor wanted to create some very special clothing for the special person, like nobody had ever seen.”

pablo lopez reviews his own new book of poetry, out now from Anonymous Energy.

When I looked up Barrax’s collections, I found that his work spans not only relatively traditional-looking lyrics, but formally experimental poems that disarrange syntax and disperse words across the page.

“I have yet to arrive / I will never arrive / in the center of everything is the poem / intact sun / inescapable night.”

“I have been wrong before, god of syntax / and understatement, god of slips in silk / and polyester, god of the laboratory, god of newsprint / and sunscreen”

For Anvil and Rose 12, Inspector Watt returns with reviews of books from Paul Celan (tr. Pierre Joris), Jean Daive (on Celan), Alen Hamza, Lara Mimosa Montes, and a COVID anthology edited by Alice Quinn.

… the most important episode in the history of Nicaraguan poetry was the formation of the Vanguardia group, one of the last of the interwar avant-gardes and the only one to emerge in Central America.

Jack’s poetry asks you, the reader, to abandon yourself, to engage with what you don’t know, and can’t understand, and enter a path of transformative gnosis.

In this latest Anvil and Rose, Herman Van den Reeck reviews books from Rosebud Ben-Oni, Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley, Andres Cerpa, Andrew Levy, and Jackie Wang.

Adam Morris reviews Padma Viswanathan’s new translation of São Bernardo by Graciliano Ramos. “The novel is at once a merciless satire of social class in postcolonial Brazil, and a sensitivity reader’s worst nightmare.“

To create something new, at best, is to give an intimation of the potential that is obstructed, and hence, by a contrast however faint, to draw attention to the obstruction and the pain it induces.