What Sparks Poetry: Farid Matuk on Language as Form
"I wanted this work to be accountable, to not settle for easy truisms about ambiguity or a lack of closure being liberatory or even interesting. I wanted, more than I had before, to risk being right or wrong or foolish or earnest or stylized. I don't know who to face, but in wanting to be accountable the poems call—a bit desperately, really—to readers I can't yet see. My ambition was to create across each poem and again across the book a complex of feelings, sometimes contradictory feelings, that would get at what's irreconcilable about the real." |
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"Shane McCrae Goes Back to Hell"
"What is Hell, these days? New and Collected Hell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a book-length poem by Shane McCrae, is an audacious effort to stage a tour of the underworld in an almost painfully post-millennial context and vernacular. McCrae’s Hell contains a human-resources 'bunker,' conducts intake interviews, shows the damned on screens that hang above gray cubicles sprawling endlessly in all directions, and communicates—pure evil—by fax machine only. The Devil must be reimagined for each age."
viaTHE NEW YORKER |
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