It’s hard for me to enjoy things. I try to be pleasant, but I’m a cynical know-it-all by nature. When I read a great poem, my mind reflexively tries to take apart and examine every aspect of it, as if to ward off the thought that I might be moved for reasons beyond my comprehension. For a…
Bardia Sinaee
Bardia Sinaee won a Trillium Book Award for poetry with his debut, Intruder.
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Bardia Sinaee
Gordon Lish, who has edited the likes of Raymond Carver and Don DeLillo, has called Eugene Marten “one of the top three living male American writers,” while the jacket copy of Marten’s latest novel describes him as “an unheralded, singular master.” At least one of those appraisals is easily proven: five books in, and this author …
Omar El Akkad opens his second novel, What Strange Paradise, with a young boy lying face down on a shore littered with bodies and wreckage. With this image, El Akkad, the author of American War, sticks his finger in an open wound. In 2015, photos of the drowned body of the three-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi made headlines around the world after the small boat that carried his family capsized in the…
Like a child watching a magic show, one opens a new book by Lisa Robertson with the delicious anticipation of being pleasantly deceived. So the news that the poet and essayist had published her first novel filled me with furtive excitement. The Baudelaire Fractal would be a novel, I figured, in the same way that Robertson’s 2001 poetry…
I used to be obsessed with John Ashbery’s poetry. In “The Ecclesiast,” a typically ambiguous early poem, the Pulitzer Prize winner begins one stanza with what could be a banal observation or homespun proverb —“For the shoe pinches, even though it fits perfectly” — and ends with a sentimental plea: “My dearest I am as a galleon on salt…
Among the responses to the wave of anti-government protests in Iran in late 2017 and early 2018 was a reignited Western curiosity about Iranian life before the Islamic revolution. Photographs circulated on social media from a 1969 Vogue spread showing models in exotic outfits posing in historic mosques and among ancient ruins. On New Year’s…
When a reporter at the American embassy in Brazil called Elizabeth Bishop in 1956 and told her she had won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Bishop left her mountaintop home near Rio, entered a neighbour’s kitchen and ate two Oreo cookies, which she hated. “I thought I should do something to celebrate,” she later explained to the Paris Review…