Sep 27, 2020
Yiyun Li on her selection:
Some writers are good to be read in one mood but not another, some are good during one specific period but not another. The writers one can read at any moment are those who refuse to have a simplified relationship with their time. James Alan McPherson is one of them. I often return to his...
Sep 20, 2020
Eileen Myles on their selection:
I picked this book off a shelf in a small place I was staying in Provincetown this summer. I'd never read Victor Hugo and found his writing so painterly and lush and philosophical and yet confoundingly graphic. A shipwreck felt so culturally apt too. I think we are at sea.
Sep 13, 2020
Lila Azam Zanganeh on her selection:
Césaire speaks to me, a French-born Iranian, as the poet of migration and metissage, but also as the poet of longing for a home destroyed out of recognition. Césaire is the rare political poet who is an alchemist in his own right—Rimbaud reborn in Martinique, a mere quarter of a...
Sep 6, 2020
Isabella Hammad on her selection:
Prisoner of Love is Jean Genet’s strange, recursive, resistant chronicle of the time he spent in the early 1970s with the Palestinian fedayeen in the refugee camps in Jordan. Edward Said called it “a seismographic reading, drawing and exposing the fault lines that a largely normal...
Sep 2, 2020
Ada Limón on her selection:
I chose to read poems by Alejandra Pizarnik, from her book Extracting the Stone of Madness, translated by Yvette Siegert, who has done a marvelous job. I believe Pizarnik, an Argentinian author who died in 1972 at the young age of thirty-six, is largely not well-known in the United...