“In humdrum fashion one goes slowly crackers.” from “The Hole in the Sky”
The 85-year old British writer Rosalind Belben is having a moment. At least four of the eight books she published between 1972 and 2007 have recently been reissued or have new editions on the horizon. I started with Is Beauty Good, first published in 1989. The 31 chapters aren’t really short stories, so let’s call them short episodes in which something very modest like a segment of a conversation or a series of observations occurs. Opening on a Berlin tram and ending in the Berlin zoo, much of the book takes place in and around that city. The assembly of different narrators, which includes a possible East German border guard, a sputtering inmate in some kind of mental hospital, and someone who is probably Belben herself, spend much of their time in gardens or in places where they can contemplate the flowers, weeds, and whatever else is growing. Small animals abound. In the final chapter, “Pruning,” the narrator, surrounded by the plantings of Berlin’s Tierpark, reminds us that our “eyes have been brought up on ideology.” We have been taught to weed, prune, and otherwise maintain discipline and order in our gardens. But, she asks, again without a question mark, “Must a garden serve us, or might we sometimes be at its service. . .” Isn’t it time that we served nature? Belben’s writing, with her love of commas and use of parataxis, manages to be quaintly British, yet startling and subversive. For my copy of Is Beauty Good, I chose to import the stark, handsomely designed edition from the English publisher And Other Stories, which has stiff French flaps and is printed on paper that is tactile and porous. I love their use of unillustrated front covers with text extracts.
I attended a talk by the South African artist William Kentridge once and he is a very engaging, natural public speaker. But he really turned it up a few notches in the six Slade Lectures given at the University of Oxford in February 2024. They have now been compiled into a compact, but heavily-illustrated new book, A Natural History of the Studio (Grove Press, 2025). In these lectures he uses his own studio as the launching point for compelling and digressive discussions about his own art-making processes and the creation of several large commissioned, collaborative projects. Kentridge’s varied artistic practice includes drawing, printmaking, film, theater, puppetry, performance, public murals, opera design, and more. His work often engages with his native South Africa’s apartheid and racial history. For a commission from the city of Rome, Kentridge and his staff created a mural on a wall 500 feet long facing the Tiber River, and orchestrated an immense musical parade to launch its opening. Kentridge comes off as refreshingly honest and truly spontaneous in these talks, which made me feel like I was part of a small group sitting around in his studio, not reading something delivered in a distinguished Oxford lecture hall. “It is always about recognition, rather than knowing.” When things aren’t progressing well in the studio, it’s best to follow “the less good ideas.” His final lecture is entitled “A Defence of Optimism,” something we all could use more of. He’s one of the artists I admire most and this is one of the best books I’ve read about art in years.
The Deutsche Sebald Gesellschaft (German Sebald Society) has announced three fall programs. Even if you aren’t interested in Sebald, it’s worth scrolling down to the third program just to learn about the remarkable “house without qualities” in Cologne!
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A literary conversation with text excerpts from Sebald’s books will be conducted by Jonas Meurer and Ulrike Bauermeister-Bock on Thursday, September 24, 2026 at 19:00. Jonas Meurer is the Chair of Modern German Literary Studies at the Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg and is an associate member of the DFG Research Training Group ‘Literature and the Public in Different Contemporary Cultures’ at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. Ulrike Bauermeister-Bock is a member of the Pegnesian Order of Flowers and a writer. A program co-organized by the Pegnese Order of Flowers, established in 1644.
This year’s general meeting of the Deutsche Sebald Gesellschaft will take place at the University of Verona on Friday, October 23, 2026, in conjunction with a conference on Sebald in Italy. On Saturday, October 24, 2026, Scott Bartsch will lead a walking tour to trace Sebald’s footsteps in Verona. The Friday afternoon program includes the following talks: Isolde Schiffermüller (Universität Verona) “Veroneser Studien zur Prosa W.G. Sebalds: das Beispiel Austerlitz“; Dorothea Hauser (Stiftung Warburg Archiv Hamburg “Gruppe Ludwig”; Salvatore Tedesco (Universität Palermo) “Verwandlung und persönliche Identität: Sebald zwischen Elias Canetti und Rudolf Bilz”; and Kay Wolfinger (Universität Basel) and a “surprise guest” on “Was sagt Sebald?”
On Saturday, October 31, 2026, there will be a joint program sponsored by the Marcel Proust Gesellschaft and the Deutsche Sebald Gesellschaft: “Trigger: Mémoire involontaire bei Marcel Proust und W. G. Sebald” (“Trigger: Involuntary Memory by Marcel Proust and W.G. Sebald”). I suspect one must belong to either of the two societies to attend. You can join the Marcel Proust Gesellschaft online at its website. The stunning location for this event is both an important example of Modernist architecture and a world famous private library. The “Casa senza qualità” or the “Haus ohne Eigenschaften” (“house without qualities”) in Köln-Müngersdorf, a suburb west of Cologne, is a minimalist white cube built by the architect Oswald Mathias Ungers in 1996 as his own residence (photo below). The stark, rectangular house has no ornamentation whatsoever. Its front and back are symmetrical, as are its two sides. It was later acquired by urologist Rainier Speck, who turned it into a library, museum, and research center to house his unparalleled collections of books, letters, and manuscripts by Petrarch and Marcel Proust. Speck is also a noted collector of artist’s books and art, especially of the American artist Cy Twombly.
The nickname of the house is, of course, taken from the title of Austrian writer Robert Musil’s unfinished novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities), which was published in parts between 1930–1943 and is often referred to as a “novel of ideas.”
Coincidentally, not too far away from the Casa senza qualità is the location (marked only by a plaque) of the Müngersdorf Deportation Camp, which operated from 1942-45. “Thousands of people, mainly of Jewish origin, were deported from there to concentration and extermination camps,” according to the Cologne-based National Socialism-Documentation Centre, which “collect[s] and preserve[s] testimonies and personal histories from the Nazi era.”
Trigger: Mémoire involontaire bei Marcel Proust und W. G. Sebald Programm 10:00–10:15 Ricardo Felberbaum (Kempten) & Jürgen Ritte (Paris): Begrüßung und Einführung 10:15–10:45 Peter Henningsen (München): Pathophysiologische Grundlagen der Erinnerung 10:45–11:00 Diskussion 11:00–11:40 Maël Renouard (Paris): Proust et la reminiscence 11:40–12:00 Diskussion 12:00–13:00 Mittagsimbiss 13:00–13:30 Sophie König (Berlin): Ausgelöst vom Licht. W.G. Sebald und John Berger 13:30–14:00 Jürgen Ritte (Paris): Wie kann Literatur an Geschichte erinnern? 14:00–14:30 Diskussion der Vorträge von Sophie König und Jürgen Ritte 14:30–15:00 Kay Wolfinger (Basel/München): Ideen. Trigger. Warnung. – W. G. Sebald, gelesen, fortgeschrieben 15:00–15:30 Abschlussdiskussion
Oswald Mathias Ungers, “Casa senza qualità“
The Events page of the Deutsche Sebald Gesellschaft maintains a calendar of up-coming programs.
Don Mee Choi has one of the most recognizable voices in poetry today. The poems in her last three books, Hardly War, DMZ Colony, and Mirror Nation, with their mix of English and Korean languages, their inclusion of photographs and drawings, their love of word and sound repetitions, and their frequent use of free-form shapes are immediately recognizable as hers and hers alone. Equally recognizable is her distinctive voice with its alternating modalities, from the sing-song voice of a child to the sloganeering of an anti-government protestor, from optimism to fury. Her newest book, Freely Frayed, just published today, is her first to include both poems and essays. One of the achievements of this book is that it gives us a peek into how this voice came into being. The book’s other focus is on translation, a topic inseparable from any conversation about Choi’s poetry. “When I began translating, I found myself crying again. I knew then that I had finally found my way back to the womb—the place of incomprehensible language and excessive rhythms, not only of sadness, but also of darkness, cuteness, sweetness, ratness, momminess.”
Choi has won a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Book Award, and many other awards for her writing. She has been translating since 2005 and publishing her poetry since 2010. In Freely Frayed the poems come first, so let’s be contrary and begin with Choi’s essays. It would be easy not to know where the poetry section ends and the essays begin, because Choi’s voice is consistent in both formats. Across nine essays, all of which had been previously published or presented as talks, Choi addresses four basic topics: the history of Korea, translation, the poetry of South Korea’s Kim Hyesoon, and geopoetics, or the art of making poetry out of geopolitics. Geopoetics “involves disobeying history, severing its ties to power” (“Race=Nation”). As I have written in both of my posts about her book Hardly War (2016 & 2022), the backbone of all of her writing is her own autobiography. But two of the other threads that hold the essays together are translation and language. In “My Hardly English,” a 2023 talk, she told her audience: “Translation womb is also the womb I was separated and expelled from as a child. During the Korean War, 250,000 pounds of napalm were dropped daily by the US. Needless to say, I grew up in a holey womb. After flailing about in homesickness for many years, I found myself tuning in to the womb again through Kim Hyesoon’s poetry. Translating Kim’s poetry for the past twenty years has been an act of linguistic return.”
Choi was about ten when her family left Korea in 1972 for Hong Kong, where, she says, she learned “rubbish English.” Struggling with language, compounded by the trauma of what the U.S.-backed military dictatorship was doing to the citizens of her homeland, she took refuge in films and poetry. Upon her arrival in Hong Kong, she tells us that “Perhaps because of the rattiness of my ears, I had a hard time differentiating Korean and English from one another. I convinced myself that I could learn English by paying attention to the overlapping sounds between Korean and English.” Years later, after her family moved to the United States and she wanted to write her own poetry, “I scribbled in pretend English like I did as a child, waiting for my father [a professional photojournalist] to return home from Vietnam. Suddenly, I had a litter of O words: O-Pinkville O-like-me O-like-me O-seaweed O-sway-me sway-me O-like-me O-told-me O-a-like-a-like-a O-crazy-daisy! O-ring-spots! O-orphans! O-alike-a-like-a O-now O-bonnet! O-rose-of-sharon! O-lily-bang-bang! . . .” [the list of O-words continues for 44 more phrases].
Choi has not only translated Kim’s poetry, she has absorbed some of its aspects into her own work. In the title essay “Freely Frayed” (originally given as a talk in 2014 and published in a pamphlet by Wave Books in 2016). she particularly delights in the fact that Kim often uses “doubled consonants or certain parts of speech”: “swiftswift zealzeal stuffstuff waddlewaddling stickysticky cacklecackled draindrained flowflow yellyell swishswish.” This is a tactic Choi uses that, among other things, can give a poem an echo of children’s poetry.
Here, Choi zeros in on what it really means for her to translate Kim’s poetry:
And if I were to say more, I would say that Korean is subordinate to English. South Korea has been a neocolony of the US since 1945. Hence, English is not my second language. It is my colonial language like Japanese was my father’s. So, in brief, this is the linguistic context of my translation. It is not joyfully cross-cultural. It impacts what I choose to translate and how I translate it. For me, contextualizing the work may be the most important part of my translation process. All of my nitty-gritty translation decisions, conscious or unconscious, are affected by it. But I won’t go into detail about why this word and not that word because details are suffocating to me. I am obsessive-compulsive enough. My translation intent has nothing to do with personal growth, intellectual exercise, or cultural exchange, which implies an equal standing of some sort. South Korea and the US are not equal. I am not transnationally equal. My intent is to expose what a neocolony is, what it does to its own, what it eats and shits. Kim Hyesoon’s poetry reveals all this, and this is why I translate her work.
A “Translator’s Diary (2021),” which was published in her translation of Kim’s book Phantom Pain Wings (New Directions, 2023), provides a brief, but fascinating peek into the daily struggles of doing the work of translating that book from Korean to English. Her ‘Diary” shows her dealing with word translations, drafting poems, and communicating with Kim, along with a Covid pandemic and everyday life. Here’s the entry for January 23:
A cold, sunny day. Snow expected at sea level this coming week. Birds’ Funeral: KH gave me two copies of Phantom Pain Wings. One clean signed copy and the other with some notes for me in Korean and English. Beside this poem, she wrote in English “funeral speech” so that I wouldn’t confuse it with other homonyms. She also suggested in English “suddenlybird.” She noted “quiet” next to Korean onomatopoeia for “shh.” In Korean it sounds like “shht.” All other wordplays in the poem I carried over into English, sonically speaking. Translating KH’s bird language is unsettling. I think it’s also the most difficult language of KH’s so far.
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“migration, my nation“
Freely Frayed opens with eleven of her prose poems selected from her two early books The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010) and Petite Manifesto (Vagabond Decibel Series, 2014). The first thing that becomes obvious is that none of these early poems include either photographs or Korean characters, as her later poetry does. Nevertheless, many of the other key elements of her signature style are already here, including her use of post-War Korean history and her autobiography, along with an endless variety of wordplay. The poems are full of the playful repetition of words, which partly comes from Kim Hyesoon, and of the excessive rhyming and near rhyming of words: “Pill her and pill her and file her and exile her and pill her and pill her till axis and boxes and sexes.” And there are puns. The woman who delivers the morning news is “an errorist.”
In the poem “The Morning News Is Exciting,” we see her do something that seems essential to her poetry. She splits the narrator (who is surely the poet herself) into two. Choi twins herself into the “wanted” one and the “unwanted” one, the one who metaphorically stayed in Korea and the one who was forced into exile. “My twinness is born out of unreasonable destiny, of distance, of vast homesickness” (from “Autogeography=Autotranslation”). Both the poem “A Journey from Neocolony to Colony” and the essay “My Language to You” are also written as dialogues between these two selves.
from the essay “My Language To You”
Choi’s remarkable voice comes through in every poem. By this I mean her ability to inflect between pure anger and strategic tomfoolery, between a woman unafraid to take on the most powerful nation in the world and someone who continually claims to be frail. Choi uses this claimed weakness (as an exile, as an Asian, as a woman) as her superpower. She writes in the title essay, “I’m actually frail, frailer than a Thumbelina in the world of everybody’s business. In my world of nobody’s business I twirl about frantically frequently farfar to the point of failure feigning englishenglish.” The seemingly innocent, child-like language, which she refers to at times as her “hardly English” or “gook English,” becomes a platform from which she can both imagine a “kinder world” and assail governments. One of the book’s epigraphs comes from the exiled Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, who references Jonathan Swift’s 1726 satire Gulliver’s Travels: “To be exiled is not to disappear but to shrink, to slowly or quickly get smaller and smaller until we reach our real height, the true height of the self. Swift, master of exile, knew this.” At the root of Choi’s writing is an unwavering, contagious sense of moral strength, the true height of the self.
I call myself Lack-a-daisy. I, Lack-a-daisy, see buttons and buttons. I, Lack-a-daisy, freely. bloom and bloom despite your boots. I prefer babbling in daisy language. Oopsy-hazy. Pretty-daisy. Oxeye-dolly. Faintly-fussy. Scurry-daisy. I stay remotely happy, don’t you? My language is optimally optional, some might say. I’ve noticed that when ribbons grow up, they often turn into ugly flags. [. . .] Pointless pretending to be a mature swan because there is no such thing as a mature child or language, for that matter. A comb for a child. A crown for a swan. A scarf for Mommy. Mittens for kittens. Daisies for dollies. Passports for passengers. Buttonholes for buttons. A kinder world awaits us.
All the poems in Freely Frayed are written in the form of paragraphs, rather than lines, as if they were mini-essays or flash fiction. This seems to suit her poetic needs, which are predominantly narrative ones. She wants to tell stories, whether violent or fanciful. She wants to keep us fixated on what has the tragic history of Korea in the hope that we can one day do better. The poem “Diary of a Return” is a good example. In nine paragraphs, one as short as a six-word sentence, Choi recounts five different days that she apparently spent in South Korea between 1992 and 2002. During four of those five days, she describes being told of the rape or murder of Korean women by American soldiers, most of which seem to have been ignored by U.S. officials, leaving the assailants unpunished. (How far in the past these assaults happened is not clear.) The signs around the now shuttered Camp Stanley, just north of Seoul, all promise the G.I.s a good time: “PAPA SAN, LOVE SHOP, POP’S, GOLDEN TAILOR, PAWN.” But for South Korean citizens, “language is not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience.” The appearance of English does not represent bilingualism but is rather “a power takeover by a dominant language.”
Anahid Nersessian wrote recently in The New Yorker (March 2, 2026) that Walter Benjamin (whom Choi invokes in her book) believed the best response to fascism “is to politicize art—to make work that trains its audience to think critically about social life. This requires developing aesthetic techniques capable of translating complex ideas into images, sounds, gestures, and narrative and poetic forms; it also requires making art that draws attention to its own artifice, so that we are always conscious of the real world outside.” From her very earliest poems, Choi has done this as well as any poet working today. In Freely Frayed, she has allowed us to better understand the personal, political, and historical contexts underlying her poetry and to explore her long poetic relationship with Kim Hyesoon. This is a very welcome addition from one of our most important poets.
Pip Adam’s Audition is surely one of the strangest books I have read. At first, it was compelling because I desperately wanted to know just what the hell was going on. The first 58 pages (in the 2025 U.S. edition from Coffee House Press) are strictly a conversation between three giants—or at least three people who believe they are giant in size. They are the sole occupants of the wing of a large spacecraft headed to an unknown destination. While the setting signals science fiction, the chatter between Alba, Drew, and Stanley make it very clear that their issues—and the author’s—are very earthbound, however mysterious they may be at first. They are dealing with personal memories, some undisclosed form of trauma, and perhaps coerced attendance at a group re-education center. With each chapter and section, the book shape-shifts, as if it were a Transformer. I can’t say more without ruining the pleasure you will have as Adam’s plot unfolds while you read Audition (which I recommend doing). For once, an author’s literary machinations are not simply for the fun of it or to score points with her literary peers. Adam has a serious point to make.
Philip Metres. Sand Opera. Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2015. The title Sand Opera is redacted from Standard Operating Procedure, a manual for Camp Echo at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. This book includes the “Abu Ghraib Arias,” which were published separately in 2011 in a limited edition chapbook by Flying Guillotine Press, each copy of which was bound in paper made out of old military uniforms from the Combat Paper Project. In Sand Opera, Metres uses inventive redaction techniques on a number of poems in the book that use texts originally sourced from such places as the Camp Echo manual (made public by WikiLeaks), the testimony of Abu Ghraib torture victims found in Mark Danner’s Torture and Truth, and the words of US soldiers and others involved in the War on Terror. He primarily uses blackout, the standard method of redaction. But he also uses greyed texts, which allows us to read the poem two ways, both with and without the redacted words. Several pages are printed on semi-transparent paper, including those that have line drawings of the floor plans of some infamous Black Sites. They depict a cell, an interrogation room, and and an entire site, as remembered by people tortured there. The poems on the pages beneath them struggle to show through until the page with the floor plan is turned, which feels like a nice metaphor for the trauma those places have left behind. Sand Opera is a book of powerful and effective political poetry and resistance against inhumane and unchecked power.
I first read Elizabeth Bowen’s 1935 novel The House in Paris so long ago that, when I picked it up again recently, it turns out I only recalled half of the plot. I won’t do a full plot summary because it would require more words than I usually devote to these mini-reviews and it would have to include spoilers. The book is written in two parts, The Present and The Past. In The Present, two young children—eleven-year-old Henrietta and nine-year-old Leopold—find themselves thrown together for most of a day in the Paris house of Naomi Fisher and her dying mother, who lies in bed in an upstairs room. Henrietta is between trains and Leopold is anxiously awaiting the arrival of his mother, who abandoned him shortly after his birth and whom he has never met. Through conversations that Henrietta and Leopold individually have with each of their hosts, the children determine that secrets about Leopold’s past are being withheld from him. In The Past, which takes up the middle half of the book, these secrets are slowly revealed to the reader through events that occurred ten years previously. This is the part of the book I completely forgot about. It’s obviously a necessary part of the book and it’s captivating in its own way, but in my opinion it doesn’t hold a candle to the scenes of the two children, who have never met before and barely trust each other at first, attempting to puzzle their way into the deepest recesses of the adult world. Bowen uses precise verbs and many adjectives and adverbs to create the moods that hang over the novel like ever-shifting scrims. On the first page alone, the morning is “greasy,” the hour is “sinister,” and the taxi skids. Various characters are “fussy,” “mortified and embarrassed,” and “dazed.” It all makes for very pleasurable reading. The wonderful cover image is Henri Matisse’s Piano Lesson, 1916.
Virginia Woolf. Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing. 2nd ed. Harcourt, 1985. The earliest of the five pieces in Moments of Being is “Reminiscences,” begun in 1907. Written when Woolf was just a fledgling writer, it is addressed to the unborn child of her sister Vanessa, who had just married Clive Bell that year. Their son Julian was born the following year. As a result, this recollection of Virginia and Vanessa’s childhood is written a bit stiffly, yet there is great charm to the way in which it is addressed directly to her future nephew/niece. “A Sketch of the Past,” on the other hand, was written in 1939, less than two years before her death and it’s Woolf at her best—casual, humorous, precise, hyper-perceptive, and always aware of a writer’s limits. Before she can properly begin this memoir (which Vanessa urged her to write), she must elucidate “the memoir writer’s difficulties” and tell us why it “is so difficult to describe any human being.” This, in spite of the fact, that she can nail another person in a phrase. The other three absolutely delightful pieces come from her membership in the Memoir Club, a group of her “Old Bloomsbury” friends who started to gather again after World War One to read bits of memoir to each other.
Newly Redacted
Two new books have been added to the constantly growing Redacted bibliography at the top of my blog. Both of these newly added titles were written by Sarah J. Sloat. In Hotel Almighty (Sarabande Books, 2025) she reproduced about one-quarter of the original pages of Stephen King’s 1987 novel Misery and then redacted his original text through pretty much every method possible. Whatever was left became her poetry. Then, on top of each page, she collaged playful imagery. In her second book, Classic Crimes (Sarabande Books, 2025), she did the same thing with the original pages of books by William Roughead, who wrote true crime stories and books for six decades beginning around 1889.
Why did I decide to read Babel-17, Samuel R. Delany’s 1966 Nebula Award-winning sci-fi novel now? Because I love the title and had somehow managed to overlook it when I plowed through science fiction as a teenager. Because it is the book’s 50th anniversary. And because the main character is a poet. Shockingly, Delany’s books haven’t been on my dance card until now. I would have devoured Babel-17 when I was younger. Parts of it still hold up pretty well, even though science fiction has changed dramatically. The central character is a very famous poet, Rydra Wong, who is also captain of an interstellar mission with an interplanetary crew that includes several “discorporated” (or formerly dead) people. The real attraction of the book is that it is about language. It has somehow become essential that Rydra must translate a previously unknown language called Babel-17 if the Alliance is to survive the onslaught of the raiding forces, though I’m afraid the rationale for that passed me by. She also has a crew member who speaks a language that has no pronouns, like “I” or “you.” Try imaging that language.
Vertigo (Coffee House Press, 2007) is my first book of poems by Martha Ronk, and it won’t be my last. I picked it up because “some of the titles are revised forms of sentences from W.G. Sebald’s novels.” How could I resist? The speakers in Ronk’s poems are often in situations that they themselves don’t clearly understand, and it is to these moments that Ronk is repeatedly drawn. “When I told my story all over again, it no longer sounded / plausible, even to me.” Ronk conveys a sense of vertigo through sentences that make you think you must have missed an important piece of information somewhere. Or maybe it was just a missing word. The poem that starts out with talk about crossword puzzles is suddenly concerned with tidal charts, for example. By catching the mind at its most confused moment, when it is most vulnerable and open, Ronk exposes the odd truths that emerge when we are forced to make emergency landings. The miracle is that she finds ways for language to mimic these moments. “Events that might have happened otherwise play themselves out / in ways that begin to seem familiar as if the sentence itself / by the one word turned the stream as a jutting rock might do.”
After seemingly reading one book or another by or about Virginia Woolf for several years, I’ve started in on her sister, the artist Vanessa Bell. Although it is not intended to be a full-fledged biography, Wendy Hitchmough’s Vanessa Bell: The Life and Art of a Bloomsbury Radical (Yale, 2025), sketches out Vanessa’s complicated marriage and love life, which was perhaps more radical for its day than her art. But the real focus of Vanessa Bell is on her art. Hitchmough wants to restore Vanessa (1879-1961) to a position in art history that she was denied during her lifetime and largely since. Between male chauvinism, Vanessa’s naturally self-effacing personality, the trials and tragedies she faced, and the accidents of history, Vanessa’s contributions to modern art and design have been largely hidden or were simply dismissed. But, with diligent research and access to newly found materials, Hitchmough has resurrected Vanessa’s many buried, forgotten, and scattered achievements, and she makes the case that Vanessa was “one of the most radical and influential artists working in Britain in the early twentieth century.” Vanessa Bell is loaded with many (mostly) color reproductions of her work, including her designs for the Omega Workshop (which she co-founded with Roger Fry and Duncan Grant) and of the colorfully decorated Charleston, which became her Sussex home after 1916.
This turned out to be a week accidentally dedicated to jazz. Any fan of jazz will enjoy Fred L. Joiner’s wonderful book of poetry, The Mirror in Our Music. It includes two series of poems in which he responds to photographs. I also passed the halfway mark in my way through the fiction of Toni Morrison. I finished Jazz, the sixth of her eleven novels. It happened to be the one she wrote the year before she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Despite the title, however, the book’s plot has more to do with murder than with music.
Fred L. Joiner. The Mirror in our Music. Minneapolis: Birds, 2026. This is a dos-a-dos book. You read Side A, then you flip the book over and read Side B. In Side A, Joiner’s poems are dedicated to the music he loves (mostly jazz), some Black writers, and the street life and people of the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C., where he lived for years. Several of these poems are paired with works of art by Black artists and with one photograph by Irish photographer Mervyn Smith. Side B has two sequences of poems in which each one is paired with a photograph. The first series of poems is in response to self-portrait photographs by Ewané Nja Kwa, from a remarkable series called “What Have You Done With My Ancestors,” in which he depicts himself chained and shackled. Kwa is a Franco-Cameroonian photographer whose work is new to me. In the other series, Joiner’s poems respond to images from the vernacular photography collection of the Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina.
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an autochthonous fist, fingers clinched—together, not Washington’s separate & unequal hand
just because I am showing teeth doesn’t mean I’m smiling
Toni Morrison. Jazz. Penguin Random House, 1992. In the very first paragraph on the first page, Toni Morrison reveals the essential plot of Jazz. From then on, her narrator seems to improvise, spinning words into music. The plot is pretty simple. In a fit of jealousy, fiftyish Joe Trace kills his teenaged lover who has started running around with someone more age appropriate. Then, seeking a revenge of sorts, his wife Violet interrupts the poor girl’s funeral to try to scar the face of her corpse with a knife as her body lies in its open casket. The narrator returns to these episodes for closer inspection several times, but what Jazz is really about is writing, stunningly beautiful writing. The murder takes place in Harlem in 1926, though the present is interrupted frequently by the past, when we are taken as many as 75 years into the past into the Deep South for the backstories of several characters. For long spells, the narrator appears to be the usual anonymous omniscient voice that narrates so many novels and stories. But every now and then, up pops a first-person “I,” and we realize that someone specific is telling us this story. But who? The likely candidate would be some 1920s Harlem character, except he or she was also there to tell us about those backstories in the South 75 years earlier. While this might seem implausible, Morrison does the implausible all the time in her fiction. But there is also a theory that the narrator is the book that we are holding as we read Morrison’s story. Jazz ends with the narrator saying “Look where your hands are. Now.” Anything goes in this book.
In the week in which June crossed over into July, I read two short books, totaling about 220 pages in all. I’m in the midst of a run of books on the subject of translation, which will probably last for four or five titles, and I’m slowly working my way through the oeuvre of Toni Morrison.
J.M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos. Speaking in Tongues. Liveright, 2025. Speaking in Tongues is posed as a dialogue between the Nobel-winning writer Coetzee and the distinguished Argentine writer and translator Dimópulos. They define the central issue of the book as “the problem of transferring literary and nonliterary content from one language to another.” Both come from multilingual families, so it seemed natural that they first discuss the nature of the “mother tongue” and the different outcomes that often result from growing up monolingual versus multilingual. Then they turn to the fascinating questions of why so many languages have a gender system, why English evolved away from a gender system, and how do you translate from a language with a gender system to one without one (and vice-versa)? In Chapter 3 there is a discussion of Coetzee’s recent novel The Pole, which Dimópulos translated into Spanish. The topic of the final chapter is “Words,” which included a conversation about “untranslatable” words, such as colors. That chapter ends with a brief discussion of machine translation, or AI. The point of this stimulating short book, is, as Dimópulos says, to demonstrate that: “Translation isn’t just moving words from one language to another, translation requires engaging in an understanding of the nature of language itself.”
Toni Morrison. Recitatif: A Story. Knopf, 2022. I bought the stand-alone hardbound copy of Morrison’s very short story “Recitatif” from 1983 because, well, just because. I began by reading Zadie Smith’s Introduction to the book and immediately regretted it. Smith was going to give away the entire story and explain it to me before I had a chance to read it. Morrison’s only short story is about two girls/women who encounter each other over the course of about three decades and manage to have experiences each time that have racialized overtones. The genius of the story is that Morrison has hidden any direct clues to the race of either girl, while she makes it clear that one is white and one is black. Is Morrison testing us? Is she experimenting with us as readers, daring us to choose clues that we think will decide who is white and who is black? Smith’s Introduction, which is longer than Morrison’s story, is thought-provoking in many ways. She provides a very close reading of the story and then goes on to suggest some of the much larger implications that can be construed from the story. But her Introduction should clearly come after the story, not before it. I am also slowly reading Namwali Serpell’s excellent new book On Morrison, which has one chapter on each of Morrison’s books. So I read her chapter on “Recitatif.” She gives mixed support to some of the explanations that Smith puts forward in her Introduction. But Serpell prefers to see “Recitatif” as a series of “misreadings” about race between the two girls, misreadings that the typical reader is also likely to make. She spends much of her chapter on the fascinating origins of the story, which apparently began as a film script years earlier. Then, it seems to me, she spins her gears a little, trying to suggest which authors might have influenced Morrison as she was writing this story. In the end, Morrison’s trickery didn’t exactly win me over. I greatly prefer the richness of her novels.
For years I have been writing a paragraph about every book I read as part of my annual Reading Log, which you can find above. Many of the books I read are from smaller, independent presses or were written by writers who aren’t everyday names, and I would like to give them a bit more exposure. Other books have publishing dates that are years or decades earlier and haven’t been written about much lately. So, I’m going to make a weekly post of these little blurbs I write (assuming I finish any books that week) and not keep them hidden away on my website. Feel free to tell me what you think.
Andrew Zawacki’s Endscape (Photoworks, 2026) has 30 b&w photographs and 24 poems (all sestets). They all come from deep within the countryside north of Athens, Georgia, where he lives, with its dark entangled woods, buggy streams, and wide rivers. Elsewhere the markets might be “panicking” and overhead there are contrails “making a sick wash of the sky.” But in the woods, there is still the slightest hint of slavery and a reminder of the old Minstrel tune “Swanee River.” A bulldozer “tears the horizon down.” More ominously, Hurricane Helene is approaching. Highway “106 got bitchslapped clean, the troposphere / overdyed. Broken, and badly reborn. A black / hole that bends light around it. There / are only ways in: ” The poem and the book ends on the void after that colon. Zawacki is a vocabulary maven, using specialist terms and words from the deepest recesses of the dictionary, along with wonderfully bent clichés, all in the service of a thrilling exactitude. This is Photoworks Photo-Poetry Pamphlet Project P5.
One of the prime locations of Andrew Wittkop’s Literary Voyagers (Belt Publishing, 2026) is Lake Huron’s Mackinac Island in the summer of 1837, when three fabled historic characters met amid hundreds of visitors from neighboring Ojibwe and other local tribes: the American geologist Henry Schoolcraft, who was to publish extensively about the Upper Midwest and the Native Americans who lived there; his half-Ojibwe wife Jane, who collected, translated, and wrote down those stories and more; and Anna Brownell Jameson, a British woman who had followed her husband to Canada. Amazingly, she had made the arduous and dangerous trip from New York to Mackinac Island alone over the winter, which took her nearly nine months. Years later, back in England, she would become an important writer on Italian Renaissance art and an advocate for women’s rights, moving among the intellectual nobility of Britain and Europe. The Schoolcrafts are well-known figures to anyone who has dug a little into Midwestern or Ojibwe history. But Mrs. Jameson was a new figure to me, and a completely surprising one. All three are strong, yet deeply flawed characters, which makes this a fascinating group portrait. In Literary Voyagers, which is named after a handwritten magazine the Schoolcrafts once issued, Wittkop seems to be one of the new cohort of historians who is comfortable using every tool he has to tell his story, using the letters, documents, and other archival sources the participants left behind. But he’s not afraid, based on his knowledge and the evidence, to “dramatize” certain scenes to help fill the gaps in the archival record and make us feel that we are eavesdropping on conversations held nearly two centuries ago. Literary Voyagers is also a visual delight, filled with historic sketches, maps, and beautifully reproduced paintings. I read a PDF of the book, which will be published in October.
In Necronauts (Stillhouse Press, 2026), Ryan Habermeyer uses the fiction genre of the “found manuscript” to create a group portrait of a mythical Utah town, taking us back to the 1980s of Ronald Reagan. Habermeyer, it turns out, has fortuitously “discovered” in his attic nearly a thousand obituaries his father had written for the local newspaper. Ninety-five of these sometimes charming, sometimes alarming obituaries are combined with a matching set of portrait photographs from his own extraordinary collection of vernacular photographs, many of which would normally be considered rejects or accidents. They suggest we are observing the very moment in which death envelopes the town’s eccentric characters. Life and death in Calypsee, Utah, managed to foreshadow the absurd and frightening America we live in today. I wrote more about this book here.
I began Vertigo in 2007 primarily as a vehicle for writing about W.G. Sebald and the history of fiction and poetry that have photographs embedded as part of the author's original text. Now I also write about a broader range of books that interest me. You can see a dozen or so of the posts I like best (from more than 600) by clicking on the My Favorite Posts tab. And check out my yearly Reading Log, where I write a short paragraph about every book I read. The Categories list below represents only a handful of the topics covered in this blog. To see if an author, book, or topic has been discussed somewhere on Vertigo, use the Search field, which is found below the Categories listing. At the Downloadable Bibliography tab above, you can download an extensive bibliography of more than 700 books of Photo-Embedded Fiction & Poetry from the 1890s to the present, plus a full Author/Artist Index. To contact me, just leave a comment at any post and I will answer. Follow me at @vertigoterry.bsky.social
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