There are surprisingly few poetry collections built around the experience of loss. One of them, published just last year, is Time of Grief: Mourning Poems, selected by poet and New Directions editor Jeffrey Yang.
Books
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Renaissance Art of the End Times Revealed in Rediscovered Apocalyptic Book
In 1533, hundreds of dragons were reported to darken the skies over Bohemia, following a 1506 sighting of a blinding bright comet slicing over the sky. Were these foreboding occurrences signs of the apocalypse, or just a lot of Renaissance hearsay?
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Photographs from a Decade of Motherhood
In photographer Elinor Carucci’s new monograph Mother, she chronicles nine years of motherhood, from the tentative expectancy of pregnancy to the whir of raising children in the bustle of New York City.
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Jed Perl’s Magicians & Charlatans: In An Ailing Art World, the Best Discoveries Can Stir the Soul
As the American critic Jed Perl points out in his new book, Magicians & Charlatans: Essays on Art and Culture (Eakins Press Foundation, 2013), a collection of essays about subjects in the fields of Renaissance, modern and contemporary art, today the forces of “art as money” have vanquished those of “art as tradition.”
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10 Best Art Books of 2013
2013 was a great year for art-related books from publishers of all stripes …
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Beautiful Books, Terrible Times: The Free Expression of Soviet Children’s Lit
The 1920s in Russia weren’t exactly what people had hoped they would be. After the 1917 Russian Revolution brought down the old regime and the Soviets took over, there was a swelling sense of hope in a potential egalitarian Communist future. Yet only a few years later, censorship was curtailing art and free expression. Fortunately, no one was paying much attention to the children’s books.
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The Harshly Lit Darkness of Lucian Freud
Lucian Freud, as presented in the gossipy new biography, Breakfast with Lucian by Geordie Grieg, lived for 88 years entirely guilt-free, which is a remarkable bit of pathology in itself, but especially so for the grandson of the man who tagged guilt as the glue holding civilization together.
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The Art of the Hustle
“Is this relationship built on trust?” Nigel Nolan asks in a caption directed at FeD, one of his “Argentine boys for sale.” The relationship in question is structured on commodity exchange: FeD’s image in exchange for a cut of the sales from it. Argentine Boys for Sale, a 500-page ebook with accompanying soundtrack by Xiu Xiu, documents a three-year-long project in which Nolan shared a home with five young men in Buenos Aires
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From Lucky Magazine to Lyrical Sonnets
CHICAGO — Simone de Beauvoir once said, “Buying is a profound pleasure.” To shop, to consume, to purchase a new look even if it’s temporary — an air of satisfaction accompanies that moment of credit card swiping, or handing over that stack of Ben Franklins.
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Why I Am a Member of the Ron Padgett Fan Club
One mind-stumping sensation a reader is likely to glean from Ron Padgett’s Collected Poems (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2013) is that the poems wrote themselves, and that he just happened to be in the room when they showed up. There is even a substantial section in Collected Poems that Padgett titled: POEMS I GUESS I WROTE (2001).
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How Do Working Artists Live?
Anyone who’s chosen to live a creative lifestyle — not just artists — knows what it means to worry. Rather than gun for the safety of a monthly paycheck, most of us (this writer included) have to find a way to put food on the table, without sacrificing our proverbial souls.
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“Eye-Voices, a Choir”: New Translations of Paul Celan
The Romanian-born, German-speaking Paul Celan is one of the most translated poets in recent decades, and we’re still not through with him.
