-
Jan 15, 2025 | 
lrb.co.uk | Ange Mlinko
The Stars over Red RocksNow you see, Urania, where the amphitheatre was. They built it, like the ancient Greeks, all open plan.
-
Oct 16, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | Eley Williams |Ange Mlinko
Where you have a girl and a looking-glass, or – in the case of one of Eley Williams’s short stories – a woman who sees her reflection in the automated glass doors of an office building that one morning won’t open for her, the ghost of Lewis Carroll is never far away. In her perplexed despair at being unable to enter her workplace, the narrator turns around and sees another woman through the window of a seafood restaurant, and this woman is waving.
-
Sep 30, 2024 | 
libertiesjournal.com | Ange Mlinko |Jake Harrison
When I was eleven years old, reading Robert K. Massie’s Nicolas and Alexandra, I encountered the longest word I had ever seen: counterrevolutionaries. It muscled out most other words in the line, squatting nigh unpronounceably, like an undigestible bolus or sedimentary rock, all prefix and suffix.
-
Sep 18, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | Ange Mlinko
In the Met Cloisters in Manhattan, in a gallery of illuminated manuscripts, are Gothic reliefs of boxwood and bone, some so tiny that magnifying lenses must have been used to carve them. One such boxwood carving, c.1500, is shaped like the letter P. It opens on a hinge, like a locket, and the image inside shows the life of the apostle Philip in six tondos. Apparently it was a talisman of Philip the Handsome (1478-1506), ruler of the Burgundian Netherlands.
-
Aug 29, 2024 | 
theamericanscholar.org | Ange Mlinko
BerceuseSomeone tried my door last night. Memory of the hotelin Tangier before an early flight. Barricaded in my room. Dinner a paper bag of fresh datesfrom the Petit Socco. Male laughter in the corridor. Down the coast, a high-rise just like this one fellon its sleeping inhabitants. That’s how damp and salt doomour castles as they eat off continental plates. The breeze enters freely past the front desk, an omnivore.
-
Jun 12, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | Rachel Cusk |Ange Mlinko
Is Rachel Cusk’s new book a novel, a series of essays or a philosophical inquiry? Parade sends the coin spinning on its edge every time you flip it. It’s the most musical work she has written, a punctus contra punctum, made up of stories that invert themselves in a dialectical fashion, propelled by a set of antinomies: male and female, parents and children, hardness and softness, freedom and responsibility.
-
Jun 10, 2024 | 
yalereview.org | Ange Mlinko
Ange Mlinko “Look for the wyvern,” Chris told me. “It’s not on the maps.”So I set off to find the secret footpath between high wallssnaking through the Grange. Isn’t it bad enough these appsleave me in dead ends, then drop their signals,as when I was given a fenced-in graveyard as a shortcut? The markers were taller than men, and everyone here knowsthat stone is unpredictable.
-
May 20, 2024 | 
poetryfoundation.org | Delmore Schwartz |Ange Mlinko |Lou Reed
As for the poète maudit, the French writer Barbey d’Aurevilly put it best: “There remains no choice for him but that between the muzzle of a pistol or the foot of the cross.” Redemption or extinction, Being or Nothingness: if the former is only afforded to a privileged elect, then one must recall that “the pistol” also offers itself in many guises. Silence is one path, even if it’s spent running guns in Ethiopia, as Rimbaud did.
-
May 13, 2024 | 
newyorker.com | Ange Mlinko
Smoke and ash of November. A landscape of sediment and char,lead and gold leaf, mutilated sodracing on its planetary camber. On a kitchen table’s crude altara bowl of radishes is offeredwith a dish of salt for dipping whole. That’s how my father would eat them. My mother sliced them thin. Theirs was no house in a fairy tale. Yet the knife that trimmed the stemand scraped the blemished skinwould halt at her intrepid thumb.
-
May 2, 2024 | 
nybooks.com | Ange Mlinko
“All too often, working poets, in their lifetimes, are seen in fractions,” wrote Eavan Boland in her introduction to Denise Levertov’s poems. “But a Collected Poems is different; it offers a panoramic view.” Two retrospectives offer a panoramic view of very different English-language poets, mostly against the backdrop of the second half of the twentieth century.
