November 8, 2024 The Review’s Review On Mohammed Zenia Siddiq Yusef Ibrahim’s BLK WTTGNSN By Benjamin Krusling Otis Houston Jr., Untitled Cellphone Photograph (2022), from issue no. 240 of The Paris Review. Courtesy of Gordon Robichaux, New York. I love density. Compression is nuclear. Big family, small house—no room (Jeezy). Used to act up when I went to school—thought it was cool, but I really was hurt (Meek Mill). Free Gaza, we on the corner like Israelites (Earl Sweatshirt). It’s opaque / and then it is violent (Ibrahim, “Wittgenstein Tried to Warn Us About Lions”). Poetry is a drama of gaps and leaps but also of gather and charge. One can’t be too precious about it. BLK WTTGNSN, Mohammed Zenia Siddiq Yusef Ibrahim’s forthcoming collection from Tiger Bark Press, is density itself, a kind of reconstructed surrealist epic of black critique that overwhelms with its range and slices with its imagination. Ibrahim’s work has refreshingly little to do with the platitudinous, overly carved (to use my friend S.’s phrase) contemporary poem that sometimes goes viral when bad things happen and people want to confirm their confusion or mystify their position. This book is bold, serious, and so funny, even when it flows like blood and smoke. Read More
November 5, 2024 Diaries Philadelphia Farm Diary By Joseph Earl Thomas Elana the goose. Photograph by Joseph Earl Thomas. September 1, 2024 Elana thinks the world is coming to an end, but I remind her how this is a fundamental problem of perspective. She is both right and wrong, and so am I. Elana, insofar as I can tell, contains the multitudes most other three-year-old Sebastopol geese and humans above the age of thirty lack. When I open the coop, this Amish-made shed, painted blue with little herb planters beneath the windows, she tawdles out, screaming, as geese often do. Her adopted babies (three gray “African” geese) and a duck trio waddle out after her; they test their lungs against the air, honking and such over the sounds of slow traffic on Penrose Avenue, the warblers waiting to share their food, four dogs barking on the other side of the yard, those big black vultures competing for pool water, and my neighbor’s white cat, everybody’s nemesis, lurking at the edges of our fence and licking its lips at the thought of baby birds. The nearly last living rooster is sexually tepid, but eager for food, guiding all thirteen hens to the snacks I’ve dispensed, clucking them over to what he’s “found.” Elana grooms my pants leg, then unties my retro number 8s as if desperate to return to summer, to the sandals that ferried my bright green bare toenails out to her like so many flecks of potential vegetation. Failing, she looks up at me quizzically, or, like, Where the fuck is my food, nigga? Read More
November 1, 2024 Bookmarks A Pretty Girl, a Novel with Voices, and Ring-Tailed Lemurs 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 often share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some of the curious, striking, strange, and wonderful bits we found, in books that are coming out this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor From Kathryn Davis’s Versailles (Graywolf): I was a pretty girl; I glittered like the morning star. My red lips would open and it was anyone’s guess what would come out. A burst of song. Something by Gluck, a pretty girl in pain maybe, impaled on the horn of the moon. The Kings of France, starting with Charlemagne. A joke. Read More
November 1, 2024 Document Suzanne and Louise By Hervé Guibert Originally published in 1980, Suzanne and Louise tells the story of two sisters—one widowed, the other never married, recluses in a hôtel particulier in Paris’s fifteenth arrondissement. The author, who is also their great-nephew, is one of the few who visits them. Suzanne takes a certain pride in having risen from the poor, uncultured working class to her position as the wife of a well-to-do shopkeeper, in having completed her studies and become a musician, after having traveled far and wide, reading Proust and listening to the “great works” of music. Louise respects this accession (her exclusion). “I quit after elementary school,” she says. Before entering Carmel, and then working at the pharmacy for her brother-in-law, Louise worked in Rheims for an insurance company. Louise loves frothy things: sparkling wines, sentimental magazines (on her bedside table, Nous Deux is next to Catholic Life), operetta music. Read More
October 31, 2024 First Person Bite By Morgan Thomas Photograph by Emet North. We travel to Lake Clark, Alaska, in a four-seater prop plane—my partner and I, the pilot, and the housekeeper for the residency where we’ll be staying. When asked which seat he wants, the housekeeper says, “I’ll take the leg room, I’m a big bitch.” I think, Queer? I ask about his work and over the racket of the plane he shouts that he performed for a decade as a drag queen at a famous Los Angeles bar. He quit during COVID. “People are gross,” he says. Though later he will tell me it was performance itself he tired of, finding it antithetical to intimacy. My partner, R., and I have come to the residency with the intention of inhabiting new metaphors for intimacy. In our application, we wrote, “In 1991, Lynn Margulis coined the term holobiont to describe miniature ecologies consisting of a host organism and their microbiome. The human is a holobiont—more than half of the cells in our body have nonhuman DNA.” We wrote, “In this project, we will ask how this theory of the holobiont can create possibilities for queer joy.” We’ve considered, for example, replacing the phrase “I’m full” with “My gut bacteria have multiplied by a billion and are satiated.” We know we will sound ridiculous. As we fly, I try to inhabit this new mode of thinking. I put a hand on the back of the seat in front of me and think, Look at those microbial skin communities. But the thought glances off; it won’t stick. Read More
October 30, 2024 Diaries Sleep Diary By Rosa Shipley Photograph courtesy of Rosa Shipley. June 29, 2024 Bed at midnight. Awake at 3:12 A.M. Back to sleep around six, awake again at 8:39 A.M. Very hot out. June 30 Bed at one thirty. Up at six thirty. Realized these are my final hours in my apartment before I move tomorrow. Not much sleep, but for good reason. When I already know that my sleep is going to be abbreviated, it’s easier to make peace with the specter of fatigue. This apartment has a skylight, and my bed lies directly beneath. All the time, it gives the sensation of soaking in a sun shower. It is as if I am sometimes being cursed by God’s blessing. No air conditioning, so I freeze tomatoes in the icebox, as I call it to myself—I live alone—and then put them on my belly and heart to cool. The past few weeks, when I’ve been up in the night and sensed morning coming, I’ve tried to locate the darkest corner of my studio apartment. This just means I’ve moved my top mattress layer, a cotton Japanese futon, to the floor. Restless, with one pillow and one sheet, I escaped the skylight. With my body this close to the floor, I can feel the rumblings of the building below me, the deep hum of the subway underneath, and the trucks outside, all the sound so bass-tone that I forget I’m even listening. Makes me think of the way that they say mushrooms speak to one another from underground, or of the sound of a whale. July 1 Bed at midnight. Up at eight. Miraculous! Read More