Book Review: “Justice,” by TOMAŽ ŠALAMUN

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Tomaž Šalamun was one of those rare artists who got to live — at least a little bit — in his own legacy. When he died at the very end of 2014, poets — American poets, especially — were quick to gather in a circle around this legacy, writing words of praise and admiration that were not simply eulogies but reassertions of Šalamun’s crucial role in the experimentalist impulse that has so gripped American poetry in the past two decades.

But Šalamun didn’t just live in his own legacy — he worked in it. . .

Read the review at Bookslut

Literary Promises: A Look at Last Year’s Books as a List of New Year’s Resolutions

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My year was rich, and I hope yours was, too. It was full of joys and frustrations, thrombosis and the evenest sleeps, massive blizzards with fragmenting winds, rains that blurred the boundaries between body and air, and the exasperations of humidity rising off the tennis courts in the park near my home. I listened to the otherworldlygargling calls of ‘ua’u in the young but stelliferous dark of Haleakala, let the shutter out on my Nikon to see those same stars in the sapphire depth of Wisconsin’s skies, and I spent an inordinate amount of time staring out at the Chicago river from the exhibit hall in the Sheraton Grand Chicago, where I also learned how to sell books on the run. I learned how to make kimchi and that my brother-in-law knows how to replace rotors and brakes. I went to California twice.

Read the feature at Michigan Quarterly Review