Song of a Reformed Headhunter

This collection of 17 tales by the author of "The Lottery" is best read one at a time, with an interval of hearty living, so that the scary disorientation that they effect can be savored fully and not be staled by a strong sense of repetitiveness in the stories. What are the writer's fearful obsessions? The puzzlement of marriage. The mystery of a child. Owning a house. The inarticulacy of a rural community. The strangeness of the city. Old age.The best stories—"Louisa, Please Come Home," "The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith," and "The Beautiful Stranger"—are not just dark tales but also very sad parables.

Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki (born 1962) is a Polish poet. I picked up his Peregrinary , translated by Bill Johnston, at AWP, together with two other books by living Polish poets. I don't know much about the history of Poland but the country seems to possess the knack of throwing up gifted poets. Dycki, as the translator informs us that even Polish readers call him in short, is nothing at all like Zbigniew Herbert or Wisława Szymborska. He is himself. Maybe because he came from the border near Ukraine, from a town that mixes its tongues, before he moved to Warsaw, the literary and political capital. Maybe because he is bisexual. There is more anguish here, more tussling with death, than in the Polish poetries that I've read before. He writes short lyrics. Here's a complete poem, from his first book Nenia and Other Poems (1990), published at the age of 28: the women I spent nights with did not hide the fact that they spent nights with me and they were not ashamed when t...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Now that I have your attention with that rather silly subject line... I've been reading some journalism comparing the responses of different political systems to the COVID-19 global crisis, and so adducing the superiority of one system to another. Much of this journalism strikes me as lacking in facts, context, and nuance. It reads much more like instant ideology rather than patient analysis. It caricatures complex ways of life to score cheap points. It is the chattering class's equivalent of street-level xenophobia. We can't tell from this pandemic which political system is better for three reasons: 1. The crisis is not over yet. The results are not in. 2. Even when the crisis is over, the results will be evaluated according to different sets of social values. The raw numbers of infections and deaths, though tragic, are only a part of the picture. What have we gained or lost by m...

A very readable translation by Arthur Waley of the Chinese classic, attributed not without debate to the Ming writer Wu Cheng'en. Waley translated 30 chapters out of the original 100, choosing to keep those 30 chapters more or less intact, instead of printing excerpts from all chapters. It's the right decision, I think, since the intention was to produce a reading text. Nothing more annoying than to read disjointed and scattered episodes from a long narrative. Still, he removed most of the poems and much of the religious references from the original, as scholars point out, and the result has been described as more of a retelling than a translation. This retelling focuses very much on the wit, humor, and inventiveness of the original. It "universalizes" the text at the expense of some of its particularities.

Weekly column for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, not only has international travel been restricted, but book events have been canceled, theatrical productions closed, and filmmaking halted. We do not know for sure how long this situation will last. After reviewing the situation, Singapore Unbound has decided to postpone this year’s writing fellowships to Southeast Asia and to commit the funds instead to aid Singaporean writers badly affected by the shutdowns. We understand that this news may be disappointing to fellowship applicants, and we apologize for their disappointment. We would like to seek their kind understanding in light of the extraordinary circumstances. Singapore Unbound fellowships to Southeast Asia will return in 2021. By postponing the fellowships, we are able to create a starting fund of USD2,000, to be called Singapore Unbound Relief Fund (SURF). Creative writers, whether they are Singapore citizens living anywhere i...

Published in 1988, Nervous Conditions is Tsitsi Dangarembga's first novel, and it is by any measure a very fine first novel. In fact, it wears the laurel and the burden of being the first novel in English by a woman from Zimbabwe. In addition to beautiful descriptions of the setting, the characters are drawn with bold yet nuanced strokes, and then set in rotating contrasts to each other. The narrator Tambu is contrasted with her slightly older brother Nhamo, and, when he dies, takes his place as the family's hope at the mission school. Tambu is then contrasted with her cousin Nyasha, who has just returned from England with her parents. Tambu is bent on obedience, education, and self-improvement, but Nyasha kept distracting her with larger questions. Tambu's father may be compared to Nyasha's father, only to make clear the apparent gulf between them. The former is lazy and weak whereas the latter was strong and authoritarian. Tambu's mother is also contrasted wi...

Picked up Rüdiger Safransk's biography of Goethe, Life as a Work of Art , translated by David Dollenmayer, in a bookstore before the shop closings due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Reading this well-written work in the last few days before I turn 50, I found it very suggestive about the development of an artistic character. From young, Goethe was keenly aware of his immense creative gift, but learned in his young adulthood to apply his gift to the "objective" world of politics, finance, and science, in order to grapple with "reality." Astonishing too was his capacity to fall hard in love, right up to his eighties. "The example of Shakespeare had taught Goethe what characterizes a great dramatist: he doesn't identify only with his hero, but grants all his figures the right to life." (82) "He notes in his diary, Every work of man has what I would call a smell. As, in a rough sense, a rider smells of horse, a bookstore a little of mildew, and a h...

When I first heard George Kalogeris read his poems, I was immediately struck by their shimmering clarity. The selection of details and words was both precise and evocative. This is much harder to do than most poets would like to acknowledge. So honored and pleased to publish in Evergreen Review five new poems by this poet , who deserves a wider readership and a warmer regard. When he writes about Revere Beach, near Boston, he is also thinking of Giordano Bruno going to the pyre in Rome and Czeslaw Milosz remembering Warsaw while reading aloud his poetry. When he writes about Ellis Island Museum, he is also thinking about his mother's cousin who died at sea and contemporary Syrian refugees washing up on Greek islands. He is a bridge between the past and the present, Europe and America, tradition and the individual talent. He is reflective, amusing, mystical, and humane. I commend his poems to you.

The gift of being read by someone who has followed your work from the very start. Thanks, Andrew , for this lovely review. "Jee Leong Koh’s latest book feels like a work that has been waiting to hatch for many years. It is a new departure, Koh has never repeated a concept, but it is, at the same time, a book that brings to focus two longstanding concerns. The first of these is poetic and the second of these is personal. "Ever since Payday Loans (2007), Koh has been asking a question about poetry: does a poet learn best by inhabiting a set form or by wandering from one form to another? Is life a contained house like Dickinson or an open road like Bishop? The toing and froing can be seen in Payday Loans , a sonnet series, Equal to the Earth (2009), a variety of forms, then back to a series of ghazals in Seven Studies for a Self Portrait (2011). In Connor and Seal , the two threads interweave: Part One adopts highly varied forms; Part 2 adheres to a single form. The result...

Weekly column for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  Welcome, our new friends who subscribed to this mailing list at the Association of Writing Programs conference in San Antonio. Gaudy Boy had a great outing, and we trust that you did too. Please take a little time to explore in this weekly newsletter Singapore Unbound/Gaudy Boy's many features and ventures. We're so pleased to announce that Lawrence Lacambra Ypil's The Experiment of the Tropics has just been named a Lambda Finalist. The Lammys, as the awards are known colloquially, recognize the best LGBTQ books published in the previous year. Past winners include Alison Bechdel, Michael Cunningham, Roxane Gay, and Audre Lorde, among others. The icing on the cake is that this year's finalists were announced in Oprah's The O Magazine . In addition to the Lammy nomination, Larry's book of poems has also been longlisted for The Believer Book Awards, the results of which will be announced in ...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Of all the characters in Shakespeare's King Lear, it is hardest to sympathize with the Duke of Gloucester. Neither plainspoken like his banished peer Kent nor levelheaded like Lear's disowned daughter Cordelia, Gloucester wavers between the old authority of Lear and the fresh powers of the new rulers, trying to placate both. Accommodation is the nature of his character and politics. How ironic then, when he finally throws in his lot with the old king, he should be blinded by his young bosses and cast out of his own house. And yet Shakespeare found in him a man, more, an emblem, of the playwright's own era. Driven by despair, Gloucester asks the mad beggar Poor Tom to lead him to the cliffs of Dover, where he intends to kill himself. Why the cliffs of Dover? Why not the simpler solution of swallowing poison or welcoming a sword? Perhaps it's because Gloucester wishes to dramatize, to himself,...

C&S is born today, but Seal was born in 1983, in Kingston, Jamaica, and Connor in 1990, in Nebraska City, Nebraska. The first Seal poem was written on April 1, 2013, and its first line goes "the cancer sun of the computer screen." The very first Connor poem was written even earlier, on April 10, 2007, as part of a sequence riffing on Whitman's "I Sing the Body Electric." So can I say that C&S was 13 years in the making? This is to say that these poems were first part of something else and then they migrated, like Connor and Seal, to another place. Connor and Seal found a new life in New York City, as I did in 2003, and then they found one another and before too long they moved together to Harlem in 2016, as GH and I did in 2017. Fact following fiction. They live in an increasingly unequal and violent New York that I hope we will never see but I wish to imagine as if to anticipate the worst. "And yet," as Jericho Brown writes of C&S , ...

The best of the "nature poems" is the title poem "Mosses and Lichens," with its precise yet evocative descriptions, and probing, profound human meaning. The other nature poems in the collection resort to nature a little too easily for metaphor. The best of the "character poems" are "Frankie," for its interesting use of legal language to describe a violent crime, and "Parlor Music," for its accurate depiction of a deceased aunt through the accumulation of well-chosen details. The other "character poems" are forgettable. The smaller pieces, reminiscent of haiku, usually appearing as sequences, make no great impression. The pieces after Ovid are too smooth and workmanlike: they lack personality.