{"id":119394,"date":"2017-12-15T12:54:13","date_gmt":"2017-12-15T17:54:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=119394"},"modified":"2018-12-03T10:39:29","modified_gmt":"2018-12-03T15:39:29","slug":"staff-picks-hyang-sacred-deer-steamers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/12\/15\/staff-picks-hyang-sacred-deer-steamers\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Sohyang, Sacred Deer, and Steamers"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Rowan Ricardo Phillips.\u00a0Photo by Sue Kwon.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Rowan Ricardo Phillips\u2019s poem\u00a0\u201cThe Peacock<\/a>,\u201d in The Paris Review<\/i>\u2019s Winter issue, begins with the line, \u201cMusic for when the music is over.\u201d It\u2019s how he defines a poem and it\u2019s a phrase that appears as the title of a piece in his 2012 collection,\u00a0The Ground<\/i><\/a>. Musical is exactly what the poems in this collection are. The language flows and skips within and between lines, pausing on occasion to cycle through refrains, so gracefully\u00a0that you are nearly stunned when you remind yourself that the words are unaided by instruments. They are in many ways mythic, making characters of Orpheus, Eurydice, and Dante, as well as\u00a0the poet himself. But don\u2019t be put off by the nominal associations with the realm of the dead; these poems are very much alive with sensuality and they exist in Phillips\u2019s physical world, which includes Harlem, the West Indies, and Barcelona. This collection is charged with urgency, which is signaled at the start, in the final lines of the first poem: \u201cTonight<\/span><\/span> I touched the tattooed skin of the building I was born in \/ And because tonight<\/span><\/span> is curing the beginning let me through. \/ And everywhere was blurring halogen. Love the place that \/ welcomed you.\u201d \u00a0\u2014Lauren Kane<\/strong><\/p>\n

My girlfriend likes to poke fun at my family for resembling the cast of a wholesome sitcom. She claims that our fluffy dogs and\u00a0our deep love for one another make us seem like we just marched off the set of 7th Heaven<\/i>\u00a0or some other toothless WB trash. Her points are valid. Our adoption of the Icelandic tradition Jolabokaflod<\/i>\u00a0(roughly translated: Christmas book flood) lends significant weight to her argument. As I understand it,\u00a0Jolabokaflod<\/a><\/i>\u00a0is a tradition borne out of a paper ration in Iceland during World War II that involves exchanging books as gifts on Christmas Eve and then immediately sitting down to read said books. My family did this for the first time last year, when I received Lucia Berlin\u2019s A Manual for Cleaning Women<\/i>,\u00a0but I screwed up and didn\u2019t start the book on the twenty-fourth. I still haven\u2019t. This year will be different. What better way to spend the evening before the holiday chaos, before the shuffle of extended family and the flurry of wrapping-paper scraps, than to nestle in with a new book? \u201c\u2019Twas the night before Christmas \/ when all through the house \/ every Ransom was reading \/ curled up on a couch.\u201d \u2014Brian Ransom<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Still from The Killing of a Sacred<\/em> Deer.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos<\/a> has managed to establish a trademark style over a mere four feature-length films. Whether in Greek or English, his films all share intentionally stiff dialogue, a private idioverse of hermetic characters, and sudden bursts of graphic violence. Yet despite all this, his films are very, very funny. Lanthimos is at heart a satirist\u2014his films are often shaped around a seemingly unremarkable convention followed through to its extreme logical end. In Dogtooth<\/em>, parents raising their children in a walled-off compound teach them a language of misdefined Greek words and subject them to a bizarre ritual system of reward and punishment: it is the privacy of the nuclear family stretched to absurdity. In The Lobster, <\/em>socially stunted loners must find a mate in forty-five\u00a0days or be turned into the animal of their choice\u2014the social standard of couplehood made Kantian law. His new, excellent film,\u00a0The Killing of a Sacred Deer<\/em><\/a>, has that same Lanthimos lobotomized weirdness\u2014plus the best cinematic aping of Kubrick that I have seen in a long time\u2014but without even the slight tethering to the normal of his previous films. In this one, it is not social convention, but an artistic convention being totalized. The movie takes place in a twenty-first\u00a0century America that is subject, inexorably, to the laws of Greek tragedy. Paradoxically, it feels more serious than his other films precisely for being grounded in something purely artistic. As good as they are, his previous movies occasionally feel like a clever prank, a verbal trick, and no more. The Killing of a Sacred Deer<\/em>, by submitting to the dictates of a total vision\u2014Greek tragedy is a subsistent world unto itself, with its own laws, its own logic\u2014feels truly real, and suffocating (in the best way). \u2014Matt Levin<\/strong><\/p>\n