Zeb Bangash performing on Coke Studio. Photo courtesy of Coke Studio Pakistan.

There are many things I love about Coke Studio. One of them is the show’s commitment to lyrics and subtitles; on most songs, such as this season’s “Roshe,” they are presented four times: in the original language, transliterated into roman, translated into Urdu, and translated into English. In a country as diverse as Pakistan, who else is making the effort to render a Kashmiri song comprehensible to those who don’t speak Kashmiri? (And yes, in an ideal world you would be able to find those lyrics in Sindhi and Seraiki and Ormuri and Brahui and Kalasha-mun and Domaaki, too; baby steps.) But more than that, I think the show is special because at a moment obsessed with purity, it is so resolutely and inherently the opposite. It has its own homogeneity, that Coke Studio sound, but its most successful songs aren’t necessarily those that could be considered objectively “the best” (that will always be Abida Parveen, solo, by herself, no questions). Instead, the greatest Coke Studio moments emerge from the most daring experiments: Season 3’s “Alif Allah,” performed by the entirely unexpected duo of Meesha Shafi and Arif Lohar; the mixed-up “Ghoom charakhra” by Ali Azmat and Abida in Season 11. So far, Season 12 hasn’t delivered anything living up to that mark, but we are only two episodes in—I’d suggest you keep watching, and remember that purity is to be aspired to only in fabrics. With such fertile ground, why wouldn’t you want to see all the kinds of flowers that can grow? —Hasan Altaf  Read More

Keon-kyo (Yeo-jeong Jo) in Parasite. Courtesy of Neon and CJ Entertainment.

On a dark and stormy night earlier this week, I made my way to see Bong Joon-Ho’s much-lauded new film Parasite. I was on edge the whole way there—frankly, I’ve been on edge since seeing the phenomenal trailer, and the anticipation, it seems, was getting to me. At the theater, the preshow jostling and chatter was at a minimum. We awaited the start of the film—and the twist we knew must be coming—with bated breath. I was surprised, however, by how quickly I felt myself and those around me exhale. The movie’s opening introduces us to the struggling Kim family as they craftily invite themselves into the stylish home of their immensely wealthy counterparts, the Parks. The Parks are profoundly, hilariously gullible, and Bong allows us to delight in their naïveté. There are a few ominous moments early on, but it hardly felt as if we were about to launch into a thrilling story of vast inequality and the horror and violence it yields. But then, of course, we did. Capitalism is terrifying. Happy Halloween. —Noor Qasim  Read More

Aria Aber. Photo: Nadine Aber.

Jack Gilbert’s masterful poem “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart” ends with lines that remind us of the very limits of language: “What we feel most has / no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.” Hard Damage, Aria Aber’s debut poetry collection, pushes against those same limits, asking a great deal from the reader—emotionally as well as intellectually—while also allowing for comprehension and, ultimately, meaning. Aber’s work here is often about the very notion of what language can do when faced with a shifting geography that requires us to describe both the self and the world: Berlin, Afghanistan, Wisconsin, the gods of Olympus, the guitarist John Frusciante, the German language, the mujahideen, and, during a particularly striking section, Rainer Maria Rilke. Aber is not afraid of erudition or the hard labor of crafting poems that peel open in layers; at times, reading her work reminded me of poets who have worked across similarly broad linguistic topographies: Carolyn Forché, Frank Bidart, Paul Celan, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, and others. But Aber’s work here is hardly derivative of those masters. She is her own poet, her own voice, and her debut is my favorite volume of poetry this year. —Christian Kiefer  Read More

Patti Smith. Photo: © Jesse Dittmar.

In her latest memoir, Year of the Monkey, Patti Smith writes of Sandy Pearlman: “We stood on either side of him, promising to mentally hold onto him, keep an open channel, ready to intercept and accept any signal.” It’s the start of 2016, and Smith’s friend Pearlman—a producer and rock critic—has been hospitalized after a brain hemorrhage. As he lies in a coma, Smith recounts the tumultuous year that follows—the loss of friends (Sam Shepard is nearly bedridden), the horror of the imminent election and rise of nationalism, and the impending climate crisis. A reflection on mortality, the book retains Smith’s characteristically flat tone as she wanders through stretches of Arizona, California, Virginia, and Kentucky, stopping at diners for black coffee and onion omelets and conversations with strangers. She hitchhikes from San Francisco to San Diego and back, travels as far as Lisbon, and returns home to the quiet of her Rockaway bungalow to stare at the flowers. All the while, she describes the mundane details of life with incredible vividness: the contents of her suitcase (six Electric Lady T-shirts, six pairs of underwear, herbal cough remedies), how it feels to fall asleep in her coat, and chatty Cammy with her truck of pickles. Smith moves smoothly between the present, memory, and magic, urging us to ask, Is there really a difference? —Camille Jacobson  Read More

Contributors from our Fall issue share their favorite recent finds. 

Jericho Brown

I’ve spent the past few days thinking about a poem by Jericho Brown, published this summer in The Progressive. It’s an outtake poem, one that didn’t appear in his new book, The Tradition. That’s part of what I love about the poem. Its existence—in the world, but not in the book that contains five of its brothers—suggests to me the promise of continuity. The promise of continuity suggests that writers can see a project through to a kind of completion without the danger of having to be finished with that project completely. That, in the end, there does not have to be a finite end.

According to Brown, the duplex form—his amalgamation of a ghazal, a sonnet, the blues, repeated and inverted lines, and syllabic verse, with a nod to the concept of a building with two homes inside—was ten years and a near-death experience in the making.  I love the idea that Brown is still writing his duplexes—or at least that he is still revising and publishing as-yet-unpublished duplexes—beyond the limits of his book. It seems important that a created form doesn’t just stay in one project. That it becomes, instead, part of a Poet’s life project. That capital P was on purpose. I’m thinking here of a person who builds a life of poetry in many ways.

The book is nearly closed on this summer. Most of the flowers in my garden have already started going to seed. But, tended correctly, a few seeds will overwinter. In the spring, I will revel in continuity. Until then, I will keep rereading this Jericho Brown duplex, and reminding myself of all that doesn’t have to be forever over. —Camille Dungy

Like many, I’ve been watching recent events in Egypt with excitement and concern. Demonstrators are back on the streets, promising to bring down the regime of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, President Trump’s “favorite dictator,” whose policies of repression and corruption are eerily familiar to all Egyptians. But is there any reason to believe these protests, even assuming they continue to grow, will succeed better than the massive demonstrations of 2011 and 2013—precisely the ones that ended up ushering el-Sisi into power? I’ve been reading Arwa Salih’s The Stillborn, a series of linked essays on the fate of an earlier generation of Egyptian radicals, the student leftists of the late sixties and seventies whose movement ended in defeat, cooptation, or worse (Salih committed suicide in 1997, one year after the initial publication of The Stillborn). Salih wants to extract lessons from her history as a communist cadre, but her passionate and unsparing analyses—of left-wing elitism, lingering patriarchy, and the misjudgment of state power—make clear that most of these lessons will be negative. “One of my major concerns in writing the book,” she says, “was to draw for future generations the portrait of an inheritance that they must repudiate.” Samah Selim’s translation is as fiercely intelligent as the original; her introduction is among the best primers for the present that I’ve read. —Robyn Creswell

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Brandon Taylor. Photo: Bill Adams.

David Ferry’s poem “At Lake Hopatcong” has its narrator considering a family portrait taken a year before he was born. He knows everyone in the photo, and yet it is “of no country I know.” Over and over again, I tried to picture the lakefront in Brandon Taylor’s debut novel, Real Life—I who toured endless college campuses, lived on several, visited friends on still more, I who am white and have lived in majority-white communities for deep decades at a time. In the descriptions of this life with which I am so familiar, I both recognized and didn’t recognize the world displayed, so fresh and frank are Taylor’s observations of the daily hurts of being Other. Taylor’s protagonist, Wallace, is a bright, lovable biochemistry Ph.D. candidate at an upper-Midwestern university who as a queer black man is repeatedly made to feel he is neither bright nor lovable—I kept thinking of Waugh’s line “a blow, expected, repeated, falling upon a bruise.” He feels the felted insularity of specialized academic life: complaints muted, seasons distorted. Everything is endless semesters and claustrophobic cohorts, which both bring him closer to that community and highlight his distance from it. Real Life asks questions many of us shy from: Who is entitled to pain? How useful is an apology? Can sharing our feelings free us from them? How much is empathy? Taylor is a student of the Master, and at times fire catches the taut laces of dinner-table talk as in any Jamesian parlor. Taylor isn’t above a bit of play: a life preserver becomes an erotic harness, nacho cheese becomes sexual effluvia—or does it? If there was as much attention paid to good writing about sex as there is to bad sex writing, Taylor would sweep the top prize. Amid the flurry of new novels drifting down like so many balloons, Real Life is the one weighted with confetti, each flake moving at half speed, a silicon membrane away from free fall. —Julia Berick  Read More