Jesse Nathan

Oct 16, 2024 | mcsweeneys.net | Jesse Nathan

One of the many things that makes Catherine Barnett’s work so compelling is her willingness to look doubt and ennui and abjection squarely in the face. To make it, in fact, a part of the beauty. To welcome it into her lines. It is the grace and candor in the act of that curiosity and attention that makes the beauty.

Sep 30, 2024 | mcsweeneys.net | Jesse Nathan

In Moving the Bones, Rick Barot’s newest, the project is both catastrophe and praise. But it begins, paradoxically, in “Pleasure,” in a vision of paradise and meditation: “My mind has a slow metabolism, it is slow / to understand what anything means, / but it understands that if you look at something / long enough, it will have something / to say to you.” The collection is the work of a consummate artist at the height of his powers.

Sep 5, 2024 | mcsweeneys.net | Jesse Nathan

Zoë Hitzig’s newest, called Not Us Now, is a collection of poems written against—into the teeth of—the particular kind of algorithmic society many of us are now ensnared in. A society in which our moves are tracked and goaded by corporate systems for guiding behavior and feeling. Which makes for a culture of trending and buzzing, immediacy, and profitable smoothness. Hitzig offers a vision for another, freer, wildly alive, and compelling use for the power of numbers.

Aug 8, 2024 | mcsweeneys.net | Jesse Nathan

There’s a dreamy and appealing naturalism to Alan Felsenthal’s elegy, Hereafter. The poems are electric and vivid, but the book never romanticizes suffering. Voices in these poems have a sadness to them, a melancholy that retains some almost mystical buoyancy. But never treacly. Or maybe it’s just that this mourning is still tempered by a hard sweetness, the sweetness of a friendship that doesn’t end even though one friend has passed on.

Jun 10, 2024 | mcsweeneys.net | Jesse Nathan

Madeleine Cravens is a poet of delectable desolation. Pleasure Principle is the name of her first book, and beyond the Freudian reference I can’t help but hear the echo of another kind of principle, the principal, that which we pay when we pay what we owe. To grow up is, in some ways, to find out how much you owe—for and to childhood and its illusions, for and against its dreams and evasions.