September 12, 2025 The Review’s Review Fall Books: On Helen Garner’s The Season By Lora Kelley Students playing football, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. At the first footy practice she attends with her grandson, Helen Garner doesn’t know how to act. She is surprised to hear herself greeting the coach, who is twenty, with “Hey, boss.” She has never paid more than “token attention” to Amby’s athletics, but she needs something to write about, and she wants to be near her youngest grandchild. So she keeps showing up to his training and games, paying attention, seeing what happens. She is open to being amazed, or even just interested. In her new nonfiction book, The Season, which came out in Australia last year and will be released in America this month, Garner, the low-key doyenne of Australian letters, whose body of work includes many novels, nonfiction books, diaries, and screenplays, writes with her signature immediacy, an elegant right-there-with-her-ness: “There are no seats. Wait, there’s one.” Soon, she starts to feel like part of the team, too: “We’ve won,” she reports, when they have. Read More
September 10, 2025 Dispatch At the Shakespeare Festival By David Schurman Wallace Photograph by David Schurman Wallace. A HEY, AND A HO, AND A HEY-NONNY-NO The old people are going apeshit for the mariachis. My dad and I are sitting on a bench in the plaza at the bottom of the hill, killing time before the next play. We were hoping to do a little reading, but then, under the light of a half moon shaded by trees, the musicians appeared and started playing a promotion for the reopening of a nearby Mexican restaurant. A crowd appeared from thin air: the ranks of the silver-haired and still-fit, the perennial window-shoppers of this cultural oasis, who show more enthusiasm for this advertisement than for any of the Shakespeare plays we’ve been to so far. They take a lot of pictures on their phones of the brass-buttoned musicians, who put in their work. They try to clap along. A couple even dances for a song or two: a dip, a twirl, more applause. Romance never dies—its definition only degrades. For several years when I was growing up, my family drove to Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. In Ashland, the main drag of olde-time, small-town storefronts fold into the surround of rolling evergreen hills; an actual babbling brook, complete with footbridge, runs through it. Ashland is a certain kind of cultural haven for those who mute their wealth tastefully under their shawls. With a complex of three theaters at its heart, it hosts a ninety-year-old institution dedicated to spreading the word of the Bard all summer long. As a child, I was always soothed sitting in the darkness, where everything felt perfectly in order. One scene stitched into the next, the actors hit their lines, and together we headed toward marriage or death. It began as a nostalgia trip. My parents hadn’t been since before the pandemic, and for me it had been even longer. A combination of COVID and wildfires had threatened to bankrupt the festival, so we agreed it was time to both support and take stock. And my parents are getting older—who knows if we’ll ever do it again. On our drive, we see the dead skeletons of trees still left after the burning, with new greenery coming up in their shadows. Read More
September 8, 2025 First Person A Little Ghost, Barbara Guest, and Me By Elisa Gonzalez FROM PRABUDDHA DASGUPTA’s portfolio Longing in THE SPRING 2012 ISSUE OF THE PARIS REVIEW. I don’t love being stoned, but I love being stoned in museums. Cannabis makes me quiet and uncertain, or chatty and self-conscious, which winds back to quiet and uncertain. Alone in a museum, however, the mind’s defenselessness—what divides me from all other objects is, it turns out, as sturdy as a sheet of wet tissue paper—no longer seems dangerous. I drift from room to room, pleased to dissolve into the art. So, I took a low-dose edible upon arriving at the Museum of Modern Art on a September afternoon two years ago. I was there on assignment to write a poem about a piece in the permanent collection; I’d chosen a collotype by Eadweard Muybridge. As it wasn’t on display, I had an appointment in the photography department. A curator ushered me into a large room, all beige and white. In the center of the room stood a large table and a single chair, angled toward the window, which took up almost the entirety of one wall and looked out onto West Fifty-Third Street. The collotype, sleeved in plastic, lay waiting on the table. Woman Dancing (Fancy), one plate from Muybridge’s massive Animal Locomotion project, shows a woman in diaphanous white twirling across a black background. For an hour I took notes sober, and then, after my thoughts went wispy, for an hour stoned. Across the street, grass sprang from low gray clouds. A roof garden. A pleasant vacancy resolved: done here. I would wander the galleries, I decided, until the edible wore off. Down a flight of stairs, through an archway, I saw black rotary telephones arranged on plinths. The gallery wasn’t crowded; people moved through it like migrating animals, undistracted from loftier destinations. “Dial-A-Poem,” the wall text, blown up, sans serif, read. I lifted a receiver, thinking of my grandmother, who taught me to dial on her rotary phone. I’d loved the swing and catch, how you had to wait for each electrical pulse to send. It made a game of communication. In 1968, the artist and poet John Giorno created Dial-A-Poem, catchily and accurately named: call a telephone number and listen to a poem read by its author. Giorno got some of the best minds of his generation to contribute: John Ashbery, Diane di Prima, Amiri Baraka … the famous names roll on and on. This room reincarnated a MoMA exhibit, phones randomizing through two hundred poems, from decades earlier. Giorno died in 2019. Now, in my ear, he theatrically elongated an introduction: “Diiiiiaaaaal a Poooome‚” “poem” converted to defiant monosyllable, and “Baaaaarbaraaaa Guest.” Then a woman’s tailored voice took control. People used to apply more drama to enunciation: they both sounded like minor characters in All About Eve or The Philadelphia Story. “Door bells,” Barbara Guest said, divorcing the compound with a pause. Read More
September 5, 2025 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Yongyu Chen on “Outpost” By Yongyu Chen “This was my desk. Below the window is a children’s playground.” For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Yongyu Chen’s “Outpost” appears in our new Summer issue, no. 252. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? I started this poem in late September in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I came back from a long trip in Asia and was waking early because of the time difference. I felt good! I was writing a lot. I wrote the first draft after a sequence of experiences that felt like experiences already while I was inside them—starting with meeting, for the first time, a friend’s close friend and ending with a walk home on a gray day, after rain, looking at the oak branches on the ground. It felt like the feeling of wanting to pick up the oak pieces—and noticing it, then making myself do so—did something to the previous experiences. When I came home, I started writing the poem. Read More
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