February 14, 2024 First Person Ash Wednesday By Sophie Haigney From “Longing,” Prabuddha Dasgupta. From the Spring 2012 Issue of The Review. I like the ashes on Ash Wednesday. I am at best a lapsed Catholic though it would be more accurate to say that I never really began, just that I was raised against the backdrop of already-faded-Catholicism and its associated traumas, now transmuted and passed on in their mysterious ways to me. I inherited also the pining and the predilection that many Americans have for certain things to do with Ireland. In San Francisco, I used to drink afternoons after I got off work at an Irish bar in Noe Valley, the Valley Tavern, or a different Irish bar downtown, the Chieftain, or sometimes come to think of it an Irish bar on Guerrero with big windows where my friend Graham and I used to like to watch the rain. San Francisco is a more Catholic city than most people think, and more Irish too. More Irish American, which is really what I am talking about: girls in red school uniforms and tennis shoes outside the Convent of the Sacred Heart, looking forward to football games Friday nights at St. Ignatius, the high school by the church where my feet were washed as a kid on Holy Thursday. The gold beads strewn on the street after St. Patrick’s Day parades, orange-and-green bumper stickers for a united Ireland overlaid with 49ers insignia. There are things like that everywhere, I know. But then there is the way the fog rolls in in the afternoon, bone-chillingly damp, and the washed-up light on the pink facades in the Richmond, the looming lonesome palm trees lining the meridians. And the illuminated signs for old-school strip clubs as you drive into North Beach and the Tenderloin—or the one I always liked that read JOEY’S ICE CREAM ESPRESSO SAUSAGE WASH AND DRY. Now I have lost the thread of religion. Really I am just watching the movie of my childhood again. I have a memory of dust motes floating around in a shaft of light and trying to catch them in my hands, one long afternoon, or maybe many afternoons, or never. It’s just an image. Read More
February 13, 2024 First Person Fun By Jeremy Atherton Lin Photo by Kelly from Pexels. When I was another boy, I was the boy next door. He was Jase, short for Jason: generic, but with a nickname just off enough to seem real. My lover—I call him Famous, which he is to me—became Jase’s best friend, Chris, a name that needs no explanation. Jase and Chris weren’t quite boyfriends, not like we were in real life, in which we worked very hard to be boyfriends. In real life, we had to stay below the radar of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. We had to figure out what domestic meant, as in home and as in argument. We were known to many for being adorable and codependent. IRL, we were gay. Because the way we were identified became an identity. Maybe that’s how it works, for me anyway: I don’t seek out identity but consider my position and articulate it like a mime feels their box. Online, I could shake it off altogether. Read More
February 9, 2024 The Review’s Review Ananda Devi and Callie Siskel Recommend By The Paris Review John William Waterhouse, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. When I read Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, a novel about an interpreter at the International Court of Justice, I found myself underlining every page. Perhaps the identity crisis of the narrator—“I was repulsed, to find myself so permeable”—had transferred to me. Or perhaps the clarity of her sentences left me defenseless. I was instantly immersed. Like all of Kitamura’s fiction, Intimacies is about the psychic effects of inhabiting another person’s mind. The novel explores the narrator’s complicity as she voices the words of a war criminal and the personal crises of those around her. Can channeling others shape (or erase) our sense of self? And how does private grief deepen or prime a precarious selfhood? Even when she interprets the words of a victim, she concedes “the strangeness of speaking her words for her, the wrongness of using this I that was hers and not mine, this word that was not sufficiently capacious.” My poems in the Winter issue of the Review grapple with the boundary between self and other, image and reflection. I wrote “Echo” not long after finishing Intimacies. Echo, whom the goddess Hera silences, is left repeating the last words of the object of her love, Narcissus. The effect is a kind of trailing-off, a depreciated self. Though Kitamura’s narrator also feels depreciated (“I realized that for him I was pure instrument”), the novel’s stunning end reconstructs the first person. Intimacies is that rare novel that, fittingly, reverberates in your mind. —Callie Siskel, author of “Narcissus,” “Echo,” and “The Concept of Immediacy” Read More
February 8, 2024 A Letter from the Editor A Winter Dispatch from the Review’s Poetry Editor By Srikanth Reddy Illustration by Na Kim. In her Art of Poetry interview in our new Winter issue, Louise Glück expertly captures the psychodynamics between older poets and their perennially youthful students: “The younger person is reminding the older one of the early ferocity of their vocation,” she observes like a practiced analyst, while “the older person is a representative of stubbornness and persistence and sometimes a kind of majestic fatigue.” Glück may not have assumed an air of majestic fatigue when I was her student in college three decades ago, but my classmates and I certainly all vied, often without success, to impress her with our ferocity. She was wry, unfazed by the world’s peculiarities—as I imagine she was in the first workshop she ever taught, at Goddard College in the sixties. “Goddard had a naked dorm and the class was held there,” she tells her interviewer, Henri Cole, “which didn’t mean my students were naked, but that the students who lived there were. When my class met, we would keep our clothes on, but it was weird to see these naked bodies going back and forth, not all of them fabulously beautiful, I might add, though they were all young.” I like to imagine the future Nobel laureate looking up from a page where some student had bared their soul to see others baring their bottoms out the window. Read More
February 6, 2024 First Person My Brush with Greatness By Laurie Stone Joan Collins in Drive Hard, Drive Fast (1973). Public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. It was 1990, and the man I loved had died. I was out all the time. I just couldn’t stay inside, and I was writing in a notebook in places where I could sit for a spell. A new shop opened on Broadway, a bakery that was also a café in the low eighties or maybe the seventies, on the east side of the street. You could sit there with a coffee and maybe—after God knows how long—you would also buy a muffin out of obligation and shame. The owner hated his customers because he’d created the wrong kind of flock in us. We were a band of deadbeat loners, off whom rose different kinds of sadness that united us into a force. The owner was a loud and theatrical gay man I also felt for because he may have been as lonely as we were, and he was trying to establish a business. I don’t remember if he had a boyfriend. I remember the startling freedom of his contempt for us—and by us, I don’t mean the customers who came and left in a timely fashion and didn’t turn his place into a campsite. He would thrash about, sighing and slamming down the cups he bussed after one of us moved on. It was theater. The boss staged his show, and we were the audience. Read More
February 5, 2024 On Nature Essay on the Sky By Vincent Katz Praia Brava, 2015. Photograph by Isaac Katz. Billows and soft extensions, the cream lapping through there, between solid graymass and float down to sea, and above that gray, more light, and off to the left, white light, then ruffles, and above, more and more gray. In another direction, blue with acrobatic twists, spreadings. Is that the aither high above that the Greeks thought divine? Mountains uplift, spray down to water, cream’s reddening, blocks it off to the right. Bastions, mirth, huge extensions, structures of no hand, silver too is penetrant. [Maricao, Puerto Rico, September 4, 2004] At this time of day (the day has experienced enough and gone through transformations, travels even), a glow from the sky embraces the neighborhood, and as it goes from neighborhood to neighborhood, takes in the whole city in its look, and that glow is comforting. One realizes it is raining lightly, and the rain too takes part in the glow that several angled clouds have hooked into lower down. [São Paulo, Brazil, February 24, 2005] All day not really a cloud in sight—a still blue sky one could see and not feel threatened by. The day would not go very far, not splinter into challenges and excitement. Then, suddenly, they move in and begin to change the sky’s outlook. One large, potato-shaped cloud hovered over the tree line. Much later, at dusk, an out-of-focus cloud echoed the land’s bared curve. [Maricao, Puerto Rico, September 2, 2006] A bit of sunlight touched the sky’s lining, and there was sun setting in the sky, but mainly it was a sky full of clouds. Their textures could be made out overhead and extending far into the distance, over the water and other islands’ darkening outlines. Much farther out, the sky lightened. Out there, white clouds instead of gray, and the mind’s imagination of a clearing for travelers by boat. The full moon half appeared through banks, a lemon sherbet over mountains along ocean edge. Then it disappeared from view. Later, while the moon itself remained hidden, its light could be seen projecting high into the sky against cloud shapes, stage-lighting a place known as heaven. [Praia Brava, Ubatuba, Brazil, April 2, 2007] Read More