October 14, 2019 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Dan Chiasson’s “Freewriting,” a review of Reginald Dwayne Betts’s Felon, points out a cool thing: Betts’s use of redacted court documents to make poetry. Chiasson says,

Several poems here are constructed out of redacted court documents from cases in which people have been held for not paying bail—in essence, for being poor and black. “Redaction is a dialect after prison,” Betts writes, in “Ghazal.” The black bars of redacted text, which usually suggest narrative withheld, here reveal its true contours. They’re also rhythmic units, building time and suspense into the otherwise affectless prose. For Betts, the way to expression passes through such troubled silences. 

2. James Wood’s “Lifelines,” a review of Jokha Alharthi’s novel Celestial Bodies, contains this wonderful description of the way Alharthi shifts narrative time:

Within all the chapters, the stories float like this, lightly tethered to what the French call récit—the moment in which the story is being told, the narrative present. The result is a beautifully wavering, always mobile set of temporalities, the way starlight seems to flicker when we gaze at distant and nearer celestial bodies.

3. Hannah Goldfield, in her “Tables For Two: Mo’s Original,” posits the existence of something I’ve never thought about before – a “three dimensional flavor”:

The “smoke” ramen, made with both smoked-chicken broth and shreds of smoked pork loin, would be my second choice, and, in the mushroom-broth ramen, the three-dimensional flavor of the sweet smoked cherry tomatoes alone makes that dish worth ordering.

4. I relished Briana Younger’s quasi-abstract description of Bon Iver’s new album:

Its expansive new album, “i,i,” revels in anxious emotional rawness, which is at once muted and augmented by serpentine arrangements that form its gorgeously visceral bedrock. ["Indie Rock"]