December 4, 2017 Issue

This week’s New Yorker brims with piquant details: “seagulls, nominally and stickily rendered, as if piped on with black icing” (“Goings On About Town: Art: Whitney Museum: ‘Laura Owens’ ”); “Yvette, a raw industrial duo whose jagged tracks should come with cautionary signage” (“Goings On About Town: Night Life: Eaters”); “black-garlic jam (if mahogany had a flavor it would be this)” (Shauna Lyon, “Tables For Two: Ferris”); the white bones of a dead raccoon’s hand that “seemed to reach / out toward the sun as it hit the water, / showing all five of his sweet tensile fingers / still clinging” (Ada Limón, “Overpass”); the mud-encrusted riding goggles in Thomas Prior’s striking color portrait of Puerto Rican jockeys Irad and Jose Ortiz, illustrating John Seabrook’s excellent “Top Jocks”; Paolo Pellegrin’s arresting black-and-white photos of reed huts for Ben Taub’s absorbing “The Emergency”; the roll of adding-machine tape on which A. R. Ammons composed his great “Tape for the Turn of the Year” (“The poem’s margins were set by the tape’s width, about two inches; it began where the tape started and ended when it ran out, with no chance for revisions as Ammons’s words slalomed down its length”: Dan Chiasson, “One Man’s Trash”); Alexander Calder’s “kinetic, wire-and-collage miniature circus, complete with a full cast of characters, from ringmaster to strongman,” made “creature by creature, out of wire bent with pliers, and powered by everything from springs to balloons” (Adam Gopnik, “Wired”).