September 4, 2025 On Poetry A Lyric Nation: On the Uncollected Dream Songs By Shane McCrae From “Six American Days and One Night,” a portfolio by David Bowes that appeared in the Spring 1984 issue of The Paris Review. The United States is a lyric nation. It has a geography suited to epic, and an expanse suited to epic, but it is organized in a lyric way—organizationally, the United States has more in common with Astrophil and Stella than Paradise Lost. Each state is a lyric, and the nation as a whole is a lyric sequence—or, better, a lyric group. That is to say, the United States is many individual poems that can also be understood as one poem. This organizational feature and the resulting constant tension between individual states and the federal government—that the states seem always, even if at times only minimally, to threaten to pull entirely away from the nation—are, I think, among the several reasons that no successful traditional epic poem, no Aeneid, has been produced in the United States (the exception that proves the rule being Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, both traditional epic and anti-epic at once). But John Berryman’s The Dream Songs is an epic. It has taken me years to realize that The Dream Songs is an epic—and a successful, even great one. For years, I searched for the successful traditional epic I felt certain must have been written by an American, and although I more than once encountered poems that seemed to fit the bill formally, none of them seemed an artistic success to me. Most often, they were let down by their language, which was commonly pedestrian, almost as if it were a secondary or even tertiary concern of their authors. But, of course, the language of an epic poem must be, in its way, as compressed as the language of a lyric poem—and in those moments when it is not compressed, the language must strike the reader as relaxed from compression, and loaded with the certainty of future compression. The language of The Dream Songs is always either compressed or suggestive of compression. The poem has this, and little else, in common with traditional epic. Read More
September 3, 2025 History Stolen Goods By Jenny Erpenbeck Berlin’s historic Kaufhaus des Westens (Department Store of the West) with its front gate up. C.Suthorn, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The border opens, and people from the West bend down from the tailgates of their trucks and give presents to their poor sisters and brothers from the East: Christmas is coming, and they’re giving wrapping paper away for free in the joy of reunification. But now here they come, the evil sisters from the East, the well-educated girls who took piano lessons at home, who know Faust’s final monologue by heart, and they stuff the West into their pockets, they slip sunglasses from Schlecker into their sleeves and music cassettes between the buttons of their jackets, they tie sweaters they haven’t paid for around their waists and even walk around the store with them on, while these things that don’t belong to them slowly absorb the heat of their bodies. Well, that’s just outrageous, these young ladies don’t know what gratitude is (clearly they were completely ruined by the Russians), they come along and just toss cheese, sausage, and coffee, even champagne bottles and chocolate, into their shopping bags, maybe they pay for the three rolls at the top, but then they stroll out of the shopping hall, which is called a supermarket nowadays, with all those other, stolen things bouncing around underneath, and those girls don’t even blush. At home they practice drawing in perspective, but on the Ku’damm they put on expensive fur hats and then leave the store with alabaster faces. These same girls used to have to line up at dawn to get hold of even one copy of The Aesthetics of Resistance by Peter Weiss—and now that they can buy any book they want, they start stealing! The factories in the East are so dilapidated that those people can be happy if someone buys them for one mark: if you want to be able to afford expensive underwear, you have to work first, work until you turn old and gray, until you turn black if you have to, don’t just stuff a bra down the front of your pants until you have a belly, nothing is free anymore, Christmas is over, but they don’t listen, those brash young things, they drive out of the hardware store on riding lawnmowers, right past the salesman, and even give him a friendly nod, if we’re not careful, they’ll rob the West blind. Anno 1990. Read More
September 2, 2025 Dispatch Intrigue on the Slopes of Bardonecchia By Noah Rawlings Illustration by Sean Donahue. When one’s boss says, “We’re goin’ to Italy in January,” one is not in a position to disagree. There is Italy: beautiful. There is the gentle coercion: “We’re goin’.” There are the professional considerations: one’s boss. And there is the mysterious magnetism of the occasion itself: Some sort of conference? For international journalists? And we’ll be skiing the whole time? “It’ll be a team-building thing,” the boss told Our Journalist over the phone. Something more was said about “networking with the foreign press” and “footing the bill for our airfare,” and Our Journalist soon found himself committed to attending the Ski Club of International Journalists’ seventieth annual meeting. The boss’s name is Ryan, and he has a way of making things happen. “Inviting Chandler to Italy, so it’ll be the four of us,” he texted a few days later. The fourth person is Valen. They are all young American journalists, and they work for the same magazine. Ryan is the managing editor, Valen and Chandler are contributing writers, and Our Journalist is a modest copy editor. He has gently placed commas into Valen’s and Chandler’s articles. Read More
August 29, 2025 Bookmarks Objects of Art and Virtue By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor From Barbara Pym’s novel The Sweet Dove Died, originally published in 1978 (NYRB Classics): ‘We specialize in porcelain and bronzes and small objects—you know the kind of thing.’ ‘Objets d’art et de vertu,’ she murmured, with a delightful accent. ‘Exactly.’ Humphrey bent towards her admiringly to refill her glass with the hock he had chosen as being particularly appropriate to the occasion. That this exquisite creature should have been exposed to the contaminating presence of the dealers, for the sake of some trifling little Victorian flower book, hardly bore thinking of and filled him with horror. A book sale was certainly no place for a woman; had it been a sale of pictures or porcelain, fetching the sort of inflated prices that made headline news, or an evening sale—perhaps being televised—to which a woman could be escorted after being suitably wined and dined—that might have been another matter altogether. Read More
August 27, 2025 First Person Salt Statues By Mariana Enríquez Photograph by Mariana Enriquez. Carhué Cemetery Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, 2009 The concrete Christ designed by Francisco Salamone, severe like all his works are, emerged some time ago from the ultrasalty waters of the flooded Epecuén Lagoon. Now people leave offerings to it, partly in thanksgiving that the flood didn’t reach the town of Carhué, partly to pray that the town of Villa Epecuén will once again become the successful tourist resort that it was for decades, before it turned into the ruin it is today, a town haunted by trees so dry and salt-coated they look like they’re made of ash. White trees, ghost trees, triffid trees with their roots exposed, trees that look like spiders on an endless march. I remember photographs of that Christ on the cross. The water had risen to cover his feet, and all around him were dead, half-submerged trees. The trees are still there, but the crucifix was moved a few meters closer to the city; it’s now on a wooden platform that you access by a ladder from the beach in front of the lake. Read More
August 26, 2025 First Person Kevin Brazil By Kevin Brazil Image generated with ChatGPT Image generator. I’ve never liked my name: Kevin Brazil. I don’t hate it; that would be going too far, and besides, if I really did hate my name, I would have changed it by now, as I still vividly remember discovering you could, when I was fifteen, from a boy in school who said he had always hated his name, Martin Young, and was planning to change it as soon as he turned eighteen, the legal age at which you can change your name in Ireland, which is where I am from. I wonder if he ever did. When I say I don’t like my name, I mean that it doesn’t appeal to me. Aesthetically, visually, acoustically. There are too many consonants, which make it pointy, sharp, angular. I don’t like the sounds of the letters v and z. To me, they are the sounds of threats, buzzing insects, or high-speed cars—va-va-vroom!—and I find moving at fast speeds scary, not exhilarating. I disliked all these things long before I learned that in countries outside Ireland—France and Germany, in particular—the name Kevin is the object of a unique mockery for being a name given to working-class, banlieue-inhabiting, former East German white-trash boys whose equally trashy mothers, probably called Cindy or Chantelle, were influenced by American popular culture in the nineties, specifically the Home Alone movies starring Macaulay Culkin. There are entire books published in France about the shame that comes with being called Kevin. German even has a word for the stigma associated with my name: Kevinismus. Read More