Steve Wasserman has experienced enough for a handful of lifetimes. He is possessed of a great skill in weaving those allies and moments into a compelling narrative that is clear as a pane of glass. Though there are signs everywhere that he was an adept observer, one that takes good notes and has capacious memory.
Author:
Guess Who’s Written a Children’s Book? An interview with Wayne McDonald
The book is a combination of riddle poems and colorful, charming illustrations, challenging the reader to guess the mysterious animal on the next page. The animals are an eclectic bunch, from the well-known—bison, giraffe—to the more exotic such as the axolotl. The poems sneak in bits of “teacher” information and dashes of puns and humor. (To wit, regarding the axolotl, “You now know a ‘lotl’ about us….”)
A review of The Braille Encyclopedia by Naomi Cohn
Neither The Braille Encyclopedia, nor Rebecca Solnit’s “Cyclopedia of an Arctic Expedition,” which influenced Cohn, are mere catalogues though. While Solnit comments on the act of remembrance, a travelogue about a vanishing place using the form’s citational structure, Cohn’s use resembles remembering itself. If the absence of this web structure is felt, it also highlights how the book is less about its valid critiques of legalistic definitions of blindness or a piquant connection between the Andean abacus-like Quipu and braille as devices where “stories were stored in arrangements of strands.”
That Awful Confrontation of Body and Will: Dancers Nureyev (Oleg Ivenko) in The White Crow (Ralph Fiennes, 2018) and Baryshnikov (as Nikolai) in White Nights (Taylor Hackford, 1985)
Ballet is dance—it is delicate movements set to music, illustrating a tale: it is adagio (slow movements) and allegro (rapid movements) and arabesque (the body’s weight on one leg, with the other leg aloft, backward) and changement (change of feet) and fifth position (the heel of one foot against the toe of another, the two feet close, turned out) and plie (bending of a standing leg) and sauté (jump); and it is the life, the creative work, Rudolf Nureyev wanted.
A review of Steerage by Robert Cooperman
Cooperman’s narrative proceeds with something of the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, all three children under Big Nathan’s thumb, Rivka and Simon the chorus supplying the agonizing commentary in their strophe and antistrophe. When Big Nathan promotes Moshe from the role of enforcer, beating up the delinquent shopkeepers, to prizefighter, Moshe starts to come into focus as Brando’s Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront.
A review of By This Time—Poems by Ian Ganassi
By picking out what was a random unnoticed cultural fragment and placing it before us, the poet is not presenting it as a truth but is assigning it value: this bit is worth paying attention to, he’s telling us, even though doing so yields no clarity and brooks no complacency.
A review of A Review of The Never End: The Other Orwell, the Cold War, the CIA, MI6, and the origin of Animal Farm by John Reed
Once upon a time, authors’ lives were separate from their works. Readers took the written work from the page. Today, that is not the case. Life and art are inextricably entwined for public consumption. Often, I question the wisdom of this, but in Orwell’s case, it’s valid. Animal Farm is political, and it is reasonable to explore Orwell’s life in order to see the novel in context.
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A review of The Loneliest Whale in The World by Tom Hunley
Throughout the book, the poet offers a view of life that is full-throated and built around generosity, tenacity, openness to joy and to wanderlust. He asks us to shake up our complacency, to be fierce and open to seeing things through a different lens. It is an urging to live life fully even in the midst of circumstances that are harrowing.
A Review of Penultimates: The Now & the Not-Yet by Thomas Farber
Farber rarely lets the reader take a breath through the entire collection. Whether he’s starting his explorations with “Re William Blake (1757-1827)” or “Neighbors” or “School Days,” there’s every chance he’ll segue to another seemingly unrelated topic, although he generally connects them in the end.