In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus suggests that the “only really serious philosophical question . . . is suicide.” Sisyphus is condemned to push a boulder uphill only to see it roll back. In the wake of a loved one’s suicide, the living are left to puzzle over unfathomable loss, the metaphorical rock that […]
Reviews
Carley Moore: Review for Painted Bride Quarterly
Discipline by Dawn Lundy Martin (Nightboat Books, 2011) The first word of Dawn Lundy Martin’s newest collection of poetry, Discipline, is “excreta,” which is fitting because this is a book about what the body leaves behind and knows by way of its material leavings—feces, blood, sweat, and tears. In Discipline, Martin considers the ways in […]
Thomas March: A Review of Sublimation Point by Jason Schneiderman
The title of Jason Schneiderman’s collection of poems, Sublimation Point, refers to the temperature at which some solids transform directly into gasses. The first of the book’s two epigraphs is the scientific definition of that term, taken from James A. Plambec’s Thermometry. That definition appears again in the book’s second epigraph—only now in the form […]
Andrew Keller: The Paradox of Desire (A Review of Histories of Bodies, a poetry collection by Mariko Nagai)
Red Hen Press Want is the body’s fate: sitting while desiring to stand, standing while thinking about sitting. There is no end to our hunger, and once we taste the impracticality of lust, there is no way to quell our pain. If the body wants something, the body does what it must to fulfill its […]