The Brooklyn Rail

Radial Asymmetries

By David Levi Strauss and Robert Kelly

The essayist and fiction writer Guy Davenport died just after the first of the year, at age 77. On an afternoon in May, Robert Kelly came over from Bard to “my side of the river,” to High Falls, and we sat down to discuss Davenport’s life and works. 

In Conversation

Alan Ziegler with Suzanne Dottino

Alan Ziegler, acclaimed poet and author, received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching at Columbia University, where he is Professor of Writing and Chair of the School of the Arts MFA Writing Division.

In Conversation

Stanley Kunitz with Farnoosh Fathi

Stanley Kunitz, poet, editor, teacher, activist, leader, and collaborator approaches his one-hundredth year—Farnoosh Fathi speaks with him and his literary assistant, poet Genine Lentine, about his life-long devotion to and extraordinary achievements in the world of poetry.

Biography: What Becomes A Legend Most?

By Ellen Pearlman

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, though certainly not the only Tibetan Lama hounded out of Tibet by the Communist Party’s pogrom of Buddhists, was undeniably the one who packed the most wallop, stirred up the most controversy and built the largest and best-known organization in North America.

Poetry/Mixed Media: The Dead Spectator

By Alex Young

“The death of the subject” is a postmodern concept-cum-cliché that, at least 25 years after its introduction to American poetics, still inspires an embarrassment of poems and poetic statements either celebrating its arrival or decrying the pretensions of its proponents.

Fiction: An Audacious Talent

By Eleanor J. Bader

The nine short stories in Kaui Hart Hemmings’ debut collection are at once intimate and profound. Readers are dropped into upper-crust Hawaii, a world in which people wound each other—sometimes intentionally and sometimes not—at deep psychological levels. While this is not in and of itself unusual, Hemmings’ characters are largely able to recover their equilibrium. Throughout, each person—whether adult, teenager or child—radiates resilience and the ability to adjust to adversity and betrayal.