Review 31 Reviews

My leavings are never quite in peace

Will Burns, Country Music

reviewed by GE Stevens

Will Burns walks beside you through Country Music, his debut collection. He speaks quietly but with insistence and a language earthed firmly in the Anglo Saxon ‘Bucks country’ through which he roams. On the journey, Burns shares intimate stories of moments underlived, things left unfinished, unsaid. But his poems are not barbed responses to the past — though many, in considering choices made (and therefore those that weren’t) gesture to regret. Instead they carry with them an... [read more]

An Emergency Brake is Becoming the Only Option

Chen Qiufan, trans. Ken Liu, The Waste Tide

reviewed by Calum Barnes

‘What we excrete comes back to consume us,’ Nick Shay remarks pithily in Don DeLillo’s Underworld, one of the pre-eminent texts of waste literature. Nuclear waste is the ‘underhistory’ of the American 20th century. Waste Tide, the recently translated first novel of Chen Qiufan, is the underhistory of ‘The Chinese Century’ and 21st-century capital: the disposal of electronic waste and consumer technologies. Chen Qiufan belongs to a new generation of Chinese science fiction... [read more]

A World Beyond Space and Time

Elsa Court, The American Roadside in Émigré Literature, Film and Photography, 1955-1985

reviewed by Neil Archer

While ‘the road’ has long been recognised as an important motif in American culture, from the Beats to the Hollywood road movie, those places along or between the highways – the gas stations, roadside diners and motels – have not always had the critical attention they deserve. This is the argument at the heart of Elsa Court’s engaging and illuminating study. Taking us through case studies of key works across literature and the visual arts – Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Robert... [read more]

‘The Smells, the Octopus'

Elisa Shua Dusapin, trans. Aneesa Abbas Higgins, Winter in Sokcho

reviewed by Beatrice Tridimas

The Sokcho in Elisa Shua Dusapin’s award-winning novel is not the bustling, bright tourist town on the border between South and North Korea that some know it as. Its neon lights still flash and the stench of fresh fish still hangs in the air but the beach runs bare. Sokcho is waiting: ‘Oozing winter and fish, Sokcho waited. That was Sokcho, always waiting, for tourists, boats, men, spring.’ Winter in Sokcho is a masterfully crafted tale of identity, alienation and longing, set... [read more]

Solidarity without Similarity

Matt Colquhoun, Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher

reviewed by Niall Gallen

Owen Jones recently wrote an article in The Guardian titled ‘The Tories have evolved as the left plays the same old tune.’ The piece aptly describes the political context to which Matt Colquhoun’s Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher responds: a context which has undoubtedly accelerated due to the present global pandemic, but which remains dubious – wait, are the Right really enacting left-of-centre policy now? Colquhoun’s book also responds to another, no less important... [read more]

The Perpetuation of Disappointment

Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity

reviewed by Stuart Walton

If it were possible to pinpoint the originary moment of capitalism, the long-deferred process of dismantling it might begin. Was it inaugurated when the accumulated profits of trade began to be invested in greater technological means of productivity in western Europe's late Middle Ages? Is trade itself, the selling of products at greater return than the cost invested in recovering, obtaining or manufacturing them, inherently capitalist? Is the act of exchange itself, which can be traced back to... [read more]

The Horn of Abundance

Michael Glover, Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Art

reviewed by Anna Parker

Of all fashion trends, the codpiece is one of the most bizarre. From the 1540s to the end of the century, men in Renaissance Europe put their genitals in a prominent, heavily embellished pouch which stuck out proudly from their breeches. The world ‘cod’ means scrotum, which originated from the Anglo-Saxon for a small bag. Unsurprisingly, writers much enjoyed riffing off the meanings of the ‘cod’, which was repurposed as slang for a clergyman or for a large sum of money. As a visual... [read more]

The Lie of the Land

Alex Niven, New Model Island: How to Build a Radical Culture Beyond the Idea of England

reviewed by Thom Cuell

Addressing his people after the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima by nuclear bombs, the Japanese Emperor Hirohito stated that ‘the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest’. Similarly, for those of us invested in the project of redefining modern British culture beyond the sense of ‘narrow Englishness’ that has dominated the early 21st century, the electoral situation has developed not... [read more]

A Process of Documentation

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism

reviewed by Louis Rogers

Towards the end of JM Coetzee’s novel Age of Iron (1990), Mrs Curren, an elderly white South African professor, becomes newly aware of the stacks of old photographs filling her home. Studying a family photo taken in the garden, she wonders: ‘Who are the ghosts and who are the presences? Who, outside the picture, leaning on their rakes, leaning on their spades, waiting to get back to work, lean also against the edge of the rectangle, bursting it in?’ Photographs are used in everyday... [read more]

From Laboratory to Vivarium

Sophie Seita, Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital

reviewed by Douglas Field

What was – or is – the avant-garde? As Sophie Seita discusses in Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital, ‘it is a label that most scholars of avant-garde work either leave unquestioned or theorize to the point of limiting is application.’ And since, as Seita claims, the term is ‘popularly understood to refer to an individual or group with an anti-establishment attitude, producing stylistically innovative work, often with political aims in mind,’... [read more]

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