The Book of Things
A review by David Shook
The Book of Things, published in Slovenian in 2005, is Ales Steger's fourth book of poetry in ten years, beginning with his Chessboards of Hours, published in 1995 when he was 22. Despite his many international awards, including the 2007 Rozanceva Award for best book of essays written in Slovenian, TBOT is his first collection to be translated into English. Translator Brian Henry, best known for his translation of Tomaz Salamun's Woods and Chalices, praises "the philosophical and lyrical sophistication of [Steger's] poems," and has achieved that same sophistication in translation. The book is structured in seven chapters of seven poems each, following the strange preface "A," which Henry calls a "proem" though it is written in verse. The other forty-nine poems are titled after things with no obvious connection to each other, from the first poem "Egg" to the last poem "Candle," with stops as varied as "Strobe Light" and "Cocker Spaniel." The first set of seven is completed with "Knots,"...
|
 |
Previously Reviewed by Three Percent
Sort: by date | by title | by author
Purge by Sofi Oksanen
 Although still much an unknown in the English-speaking world, Finnish-Estonian playwright, novelist, and activist Sofi Oksanen has become something of a household name in northern and central Europe. Declared Estonia's "Person of the Year" in 2009, Oksanen is the first to win both of Finland's...
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugresic
 This is an admittedly biased statement (disclaimer: the first book Open Letter published was Ugresic's Nobody's Home, and I was responsible for Dalkey's publishing Thank You for Not Reading a few years back), but I honestly believe that Dubravka Ugresic is one of the most interesting writers...
|
More Than Three Decades of Quality Writing and Criticism
The National Book Critics Circle, founded in 1974, honors outstanding writing and fosters a national conversation about reading, criticism, and literature. To learn about how to join, click here.
|
|
Don't Miss
