Book Reviews
ON ENSō BY SHIN YU PAI
A twenty-year retrospective of this Taiwanese-American writer, Ensō flows among genres — poetry, personal essay, visual art — and out of its book-binding onto online audio (songs, readings) and video (installation art, short film) that add sensory dimensions to the printed page. Michael Stipe even makes a brief audio appearance reading twenty-eight haiku. Simultaneously a document of her art and the process of making it, Ensō is a record of a woman growing into a mother: learning to nurture her self and her creative talents, mothering the wounds of her father, bringing a child — a son — into the world, parenting a community with collaborative projects.
On Brian Teare’s Doomstead Days in On the Seawall
On survivalist sites, “doomstead” is the term for a home that can safely ride out a disaster: it’s buried or bermed on three sides, insulated concrete usually, sealed and defended from the outside world in every way. Teare’s lyric dwelling place is a poem—just as stanza derives from the Italian word for room. He imagines an enlightened alternative that operates the opposite of the doomstead: opening up to everything around us to begin again, anew. . . . So Teare asks throughout these poems: how do we look for life? how to stay in motion? can any poem really teach us how to live—or guide us—through an apocalypse? Teare walks us into the answers. Literally.
On Martha Rhodes’s The Thin Wall in Kenyon Review Online
You can read The Thin Wall as a gradual, sly assembly of elements elliptically spun into a feminist story. From Eve, the original bad girl of the Bible—who cast us out of Paradise—to the witches of Salem and today’s professional female, Rhodes suggests society considers women even unworthy of time. “Thus, I continue to take / it from you, one second, then another.”
