And I wondered if I was awake or asleep, if it was the moon's paleness or Lucifer's, if it was midnight or dawn!

Harris Wheless reviews Damion Searls’ new translation of André Gide’s “Marshlands.”

It was on this final line / of descent that Avon brought / her Tarzan poem to a close, / following the message / from the Commander: / “MU-SIC! MU-SIC!”

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.

To simply be a part of the changing afternoon light  The old man I see / in my visions is composed of all the days / in between  Your sense/awareness of who you are cannot be confined within / language  You go up to Medicine Bow / and open the sky and step through

Then, early one morning, as the night was thinning out; as — like a ball of alms rice whitened with yogurt in the hand of the mendicant called Time; like a lump of foam on the dark river of the night sky; like a fragment of the celestial nymph Menakā’s white crystal nail file; dappled as beautifully as a honeycomb

“Art has to have a sense of pleasure and danger, of stretching limitations and perceptions.”

As the artist, reaching deep into nothing, with nothing, and only for the sake of desire, creates something great, far beyond the imagined object of desire, fulfilling and exceeding every wish in a way which could never have been fully anticipated, so too does the lover encounter the beloved.

“I decided early that poetry is made of exact details.” Ultimately, in his poetry, [Flora’s] details are raised far beyond prosaic, everyday specification, simple catalogues of what make up, to use the title of one of his early books, The Physical World (1977).

He was not a literary artist in the sense that his work doesn’t seem to wrestle with questions of form; he’s not attempting to reinvent the surrealist modes at his disposal but rather making use of them as vehicles for his insurgent imagination and apocalyptic vision, the fury of which elevates his writing above and beyond the mere assemblage of irrational word combinations.

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”

“small e for entropy / big S for Sacraments”

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.“