David Hadbawnik and Anne Carson aren’t aiming to produce new schoolroom translations of the classics; they’ve reimagined these ancient texts in the light of our violent and chaotic contemporaneity.
New Directions
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Humankind’s History of Betraying Animals
Thalia Field’s poems collage scientific, historical, and philosophical sources to explore speciesism.
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Missives From the War to End All Wars
Elizabeth Gray’s poems seek to discover where we are in the midst of a battle we can never fully see.
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César Aira Portrays Artforum as an Object of Desire
The novelist transforms the magazine into an ambiguous symbol of everything its reader might lack.
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A Writer’s Portrait of Louise Bourgeois
Now, Now Louison is a book that will trouble purists who believe in strict categories, such as biography, art criticism, and novel.
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Susan Howe’s Feminist Poetics
Throughout her work and in her latest volume, Concordance, Howe confronts the plight of the female writer in a masculine literary culture.
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The Artists Who Wrote Poetry at Black Mountain, From Josef Albers to John Cage
Including poems from well known writers and less expected artists, Black Mountain Poems produces a keener vision of the interdisciplinary culture of the famed college.
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A Book Assumes the Voice of Louise Bourgeois in Uncomfortable Ways
Jean Frémon began his book Now, Now, Louison while the artist, who was also a friend, was still alive.
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César Aira’s Memoir Responds to an Existentialist Crisis
Whatever might be truth or fiction in Birthday is used in service of the book’s main question: What has been the purpose of the author’s life?
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A New Collection of Surrealist Writings Focuses on Women Authors
The Milk Bowl of Feathers shows how women’s contributions to the Surrealist literary canon captivatingly crack the wall of Surrealist phallocracy.
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A Dystopian Fairy Tale Reflects Challenges of the Present
Despite the serious environmental and political challenges presented in The Emissary, Yoko Tawada suggests that another path exists.
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Intertextual Depth in Susan Howe’s Debths
These poems collage Paul Thek’s art, 19th-century American literature, and a fairy tale to create a fresh understanding of the memory and soul.