Martha Silano, This One We Call Ours
Lynx House Press
“What They Said,” the prefatory poem in this powerful prize-winning sixth collection from Martha Silano, places the reader somewhere in the Milky Way, peering through the galaxy of dead stars to “its one/planet with one ocean. This one we/float on, this one we call ours.” One easily conjures the famous photo of earth from space—a sphere of blue and green and swaths of white. What follows is an eruption of poems of planetary evolution and devolution. Organized by the seasons redefined (ex. Yearly 1,000-year Floods, 60,000 Wildfires, Fear of Heat Dome, Bacterial Lake Closure Season [formerly summer]), Silano braces us for extinction with her trademark blend of humor, pathos, and wisdom.
The poet deftly weaves scientific, natural, and daily imagery in a conversational tone in her poems. The result is less climate crisis handwringing and more a celebratory eulogy of “the cheetah,/black-footed ferret, and Joshua trees.” If someone is going to tell us we are killing our planet, let it be Martha Silano—a poet who hopefully suggests in the poem “We Are All Magnificent” that “Sometimes we take a catastrophe and turn it into a kiss.” A chef’s kiss to This One We Call Ours.
Heidi Seaborn
Executive Editor
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Osamu Dazai, The Beggar Student
New Directions
In a tight ninety-six pages, we begin the novella mere seconds after fictional writer Osamu Dazai mails a truly awful manuscript to his publisher. Riddled with regret and self-recrimination, he spirals into despair, doubting both his abilities as a writer and a man. Bemoaning his sorry state and uncertain how best to solve a problem he very much brought upon himself, he proceeds to, quite literally, run away from them. And on this trek through the suburbs of Tokyo, he stumbles upon a boy, decades his junior, whom he has every intention of taking under his wing. The boy, as it turns out, has other plans. The two become embroiled in one intellectual spat after another, with our protagonist seldom emerging as the victor. Sustaining loss after loss, his shame compounded, we watch as a man falls victim to his pride. There are moments, in the thick of it, where we question whether Dazai believes half the nonsense he spews in an effort, however misguided, to convince himself and others that he’s more than who he is. There are other moments, of the blink-and-you’d-miss-it variety, where we sort-of-maybe buy it.
Franchesca Viaud
Content Editor
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Marcel Proust, Translated by Lydia Davis, Letters to His Neighbor
New Directions
Lydia Davis translates ten years of correspondence between Marcel Proust and his upstairs neighbor, Mme Williams, a musician and the wife of a dentist whose home and practice were directly above Proust’s apartments at 102 Boulevard Haussmann. Though most of the letters can be summarized as obsequious pleas for the Williamses and their workers to keep it down, they are full of Proust’s charm, his signature digressive sentences and his nested clauses, rendered lucidly in the translation with faithful and minimal punctuation. Through Davis, a familiar voice emerges: polite, dreamy, precise, but rather than building a novel, here Proust constructs himself for a neighbor admired but almost never seen. At Boulevard Haussmann, Proust was often bedridden in his cork lined room, fearing noise and disturbance, waking at 9 p.m. for his single meal of the day (a croissant and a special coffee, Davis tells us in the afterword) and writing for much of the night. These letters give us a sense of the practical concerns of that lifestyle devoted to suffering, writing, and recollection. The final two letters, from 1916 and 1918, are the best, and count as some new word from Proust: “Already I carry around with me in my mind so many dissolved deaths, that each new one causes supersaturation and crystallizes all my griefs into an infrangible block.”
Ben Marra
Content Editor
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Srikanth Reddy, The Unsignificant
Wave Books
How many hounds were engraved on the shield of Achilles? Homer seems to know the answer, but John Flaxman, a sculptor whose interpretation of the shield was displayed at King George IV’s coronation, presents an alteration: of the Iliad’s nine shield-hounds, only eight were wrought in gold. What to make of this missing dog? Srikanth Reddy’s The Unsignificant mobilizes a sequence of such artistic losses in translation. Born from a series of lectures, the collection traverses art history in search of expansive elisions—perhaps not losses in translation, but transformations.
These moments spring from unlikely sources: a forgotten William Carlos Williams poem, Galileo’s late-life meeting with Milton, Gertrude Stein’s echolocational portrait of Picasso. In alteration, Reddy finds the potential for limitless creation. In resemblance, a fractal-wise web of miraculous internal difference. The Unsignificant is a wry, elegant, and remarkable weaving of the luminous connections—likenesses, or not-unlikenesses—that arch between times, people, forms of art and science; liner notes for the song “we all live.” Reddy invites us to fall deep into the background of everyday perception, then invert into a new splendor of seeing.
Mia George
Content Editor
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Margaret Ross, Saturday
The Song Cave
The poems in Margaret Ross’s Saturday are extraordinary renderings of consciousness. She presents a world that feels unlivable, but the visionary quality of her aesthetic makes an argument for sensory experiences, landscapes, and art that might, on rare occasions, fortify us in the midst of life’s inherent turbulence.
Many of these poems explore failed romantic or strained family relationships in which the speaker’s desires fail to align with those of the people she loves. The motives of every figure are ruthlessly interrogated, especially her own. Characters that fail each other abound. Smartly, these highly-personal dramas play out in the context of current events. At the end of “Inner Wall,” a poem including an encounter with an unhoused man in a local park where small children play, she writes, “Suspect admonitions, divisions. // Detach yourself from the suffering on which / your comfort depends. But I want / to remember where I learned that.”
That last sentence is the best to parse from a book that resists easy categories. It’s the idea that animates Saturday—memory treated as a source of mystery, pain, and poetic inspiration, in which, as Ross notes in another poem from this book, “…the physical sensation of the journey / is a feeling of prolonged withdrawal.”
David Roderick
Director of Content
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Raymond Antrobus, Signs, Music
Tin House
How do the echoes of our own childhood shape the parents we grow into? How does the terrain of our inner worlds shift under the weight of parenthood? Signs, Music by Raymond Antrobus explores these profound questions, tracing the delicate line between the “hypothetical” and the “real” of what it means to be a parent, to be someone’s child. This two-part sequence poem unravels the threads of memory and identity, capturing the fraught and tender evolution from child to father, an experience delicately rendered in the line, “I became fatherless at 26 and a father / at 35 and whenever I look out // the living room window I feel myself / become the child left alone in the house.” In another moment both poignant and piercing — “Dads / who’ve struggled to love themselves, / love their babies / resembling them!” — Antrobus distills the paradox of inherited love and inherited pain. The collection carries an asymptotic quality, each poem reaching toward an elusive understanding, a truth that hovers just beyond the grasp of language. The first word the speaker’s son signs is “music,” a moment that resonates as a quiet symphony of connection across generations. Antrobus’ lyrical verse moves like a delicate but unflinching whisper, guiding readers through a journey that is deeply personal yet universally resonant. Perhaps we are all just leaves “rustling in the wind,” waiting for a breeze to carry us back to our roots, back to our origin story, back home.
Divya Mehrish
Associate Director of Content
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