Tag: criticism

A review of The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction By Dean Young

Throughout, there’s a lot of luminous polemic, a slue of terrific poems (Man Ray’s ‘Untitled’ was a new one on me), a bevy of insights about art and poetry. If you are looking for a classy thought-provoking rant, if you want something to stir and shake you up and perhaps inspire you to start writing poems (if you don’t already) then The Art of Recklessness is prescribed.

New Stereotypes: Carroll & Graf’s Freedom in this Village

The book assumes that race and homosexuality (blackness and gayness) are real categories, and draws part of its authority from the social and historical importance these subjects have been given by many people through the years, but the idea of race is as suspect as the idea of strict sexual orientations. Skin is not a significant emblem of existential being (despite hundreds of years of western racialism, and the 1930s Negritude movement in Africa, France, Haiti, and Martinique, and the 1960s/70s black arts movement in the United States).

Anne Tyler, a Nineteenth Century Contemporary

Tyler has brought exceptional skill and variety to an unaccustomed area of literary activity, the world of the best-seller. Her combination of popularity and quality recalls the great novelists of another century. Erudite guest reviewer Bob Williams looks at Tyler’s…

A Philosophical Examination of the film Shattered

Such is the stuff of our nightmares – body snatching, demonic possession, waking up in a strange place, not knowing who we are. Without a continuous personal history – we are not. It is what binds our various bodies, states…