In this latest Anvil and Rose, Inspector Watt reviews books by Agustín Guambo, David Lehman, J. Michael Martinez, Maureen N. McLane, and Chelsey Minnis.

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.“

Joe Safdie hits two bird with one stone reviewing Ammiel Alcalay’s A Bibliography for After Jews and Arabs and his forthcoming Ghost Talk.

Herman Van den Reeck returns for 5 lightning reviews of books by Justin Phillip Reed, Lana Del Rey, Maria Dahvana Headley, Eliza Griswold, and Norman Finkelstein.

‘Song. Sang Freud. Spread on the chalcedony, a land there is no title to.’ And where is that? …

The artist Tom Leaver is a painter who dons rubber gloves, dips his fingertips into the palette, and spreads gestures across the canvas. To him, it is an act of meditation, the procession of time throughout a day distilled into an image.

From within Varela’s rough text, Lara extracts unexpected threads of forms, unarticulated rhythms and figures of speech that keep the metaphors together and yet, by the same token, undermine and fulfill Varela’s austere treatment.

The wish to avoid the difficulties of attempting to reproduce Valéry’s own rhyme and scansion is understandable, but replacing them with another set of procedural impositions doesn’t necessarily allow the translation to do justice to the original.

We're casting about, looking for anything that could possibly make the world even slightly less terrible. It's not even that strange that our conversation about films is much louder and emotional than, say, immigration reform or tax policy or Wall Street regulation.

Every word of this book is Angel, ἄγγελος, the potently vitaminal vessel through which eternity manifests as dilatory consciousness in this world.

In a new twist on the Anvil and Rose column, Inspector Watt reviews the reviews of Dwight Garner.

Herman Van den Reeck reviews books of poetry by Kerrin Mccadden, Deborah Paredez and Richard Blanco, and anthologies of Affrilachian and Conceptual poetry.

What does it mean to identify with these characters? To find their struggles the same as my own?

Equal parts Star Wars, On the Road, Deleuzean war machine, and surrealist delirium, this poem-ever-in-progress is literature on steroids, philosophy on acid. It is scandalous, funny, erudite, and endlessly generative. It is an epic without organs.

Gay and lesbian artists would be best served by curators and gallery-goers taking their work seriously as art, and rejecting the sexualized promotional copy which today passes for queer aesthetics.

Kelly, I say, has been islanding, becoming island, all sea, breeze, epos now, all crossroads, it bringing the news, that is poetry.

Evan Kennedy’s new book might be called a long prose-poem, but not liking that term, I think it better to say that it is merely (which is to say “purely, nakedly”) a Poem.

Inspector Watt delivers five flash reviews of books of poetry by Lyn Hejinian, Deborah Landau, Sabrina Orah Mark, Melissa Monroe, and Sarah Ruhl.

In this 5th installment of the biweekly Anvil and Rose, Hermann Van den Reeck returns with flash reviews of books by Patrick Greany and Sabine Zelger; Melissa Lozada-Oliva; Nancy Lee; Jessica Q. Stark; and Rachel Blau DuPlessis.

Martin Eden is the story of an autodidact who, in transcending his social class and achieving artistic success, becomes trapped in both the strictures of the culture industry and the confines of his own rigid ideology.