Tag: Peter Valente
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“Guns on the Roof”: Peter Valente Reviews The Survivalists, a novel by Kashana Cauley
They torture all the women and children Then they’ve put the men to the gun Because across the human frontier Freedom’s always on the run —from “Guns on the Roof” by The Clash Kashana Cauley’s novel The Survivalists deals with questions of race, class, and the problems of late capitalism in a story that revolves…
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“Art Is Life and Life Is Art”: Peter Valente on Tell Me I’m an Artist, a new novel by Chelsea Martin
Chelsea Martin’s novel, Tell Me I’m an Artist, is a coming-of-age story about a young artist, Joelle Berry (Joey), living in San Francisco and studying at an unnamed Art School, as she confronts her own complex feels about what it means to create meaningful art while balancing the problems that she left behind in her…
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“There is now only light in my eyes”: On Antonio Gamoneda’s Book of the Cold by Peter Valente
Antonio Gamoneda was only five years old when the Spanish Civil War began in 1936. He came of age during the Franco regime, a time when fear, ideological repression, incarcerations, and executions were commonplace. It is no surprise that someone who experienced such a world would not take the representations of reality for granted. In…
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“A visible light in the gathering darkness”: Peter Valente on Ennio Moltedo’s Poetry Collection Night
On September 11, 1973, Augusto Pinochet seized power in Chile during a coup d’état supported by the United States, overthrowing the democratically elected left-wing government of Salvador Allende. During Pinochet’s seventeen-year authoritarian military dictatorship, he persecuted leftists, socialists, and critics of his regime, which resulted in the executions and imprisonment of thousands of people, and…
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“And in a Heap Cam on Them with a Swack”: Notes by Peter Valente on a Few Passages in Gavin Douglas’ Aeneid with Examples of Its influence on Modernist Poetry
With new translations of Virgil’s Aeneid appearing last year, Shadi Bartsch’s translation of 2021 (only the second English translation from a woman; the first was by Sarah Ruden in 2009) and David Hadbawnik’s translation, which was published this past August, I thought it would be interesting to examine passages from the first English rendering of…
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“A Person’s Life Is Political”: Notes on David Wojnarowicz’s Work by Peter Valente
I’d always felt an alienation from the “art” world as well as the alienation from the forward thrust of civilization. —David Wojnarowicz On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. It was an unprovoked attack that shocked the European community. As of this writing, Putin continues to attack the Ukrainian people, who have shown great resistance,…
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“WE NEVER SEE ANYTHING CLEARLY”: Notes on John Ruskin’s Modern Painters by Peter Valente
It is autumn and there is a chill in the air. As I write, there are major exhibits of J.M.W Turner’s work in Boston and Texas, and that brings to mind the work of John Ruskin, the writer who knew very early the importance of Turner’s paintings. As I think of Ruskin’s work, and his…
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“Notes on Ann Lewinson’s Still Life with Meredith,” a book review by Peter Valente
Ann Lewinson’s novella Still Life with Meredith is fantastically perverse, erudite, essayistic, and precise as a laser as it navigates high and low cultures and literatures. With the passionate eye of a critic, the narrator flirts with Lacan and Derrida and with raw sexual language. The result is a novella that is funny, bizarre, unhinged,…
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Peter Valente: “Notes on John Wieners’ ‘A Poem for Painters’” (Selected Poems 1958-1984), written after reading Bill Berkson’s Sudden Address
In “A Poem for Painters,” John Wieners writes: Paul Klee scratched for seven yearson smoked glass, to develophis line, LaVigne says, lookat his face! He who has spentall night drawing mine. In his diary of 1906, Klee wrote about his “reverse glass paintings,”: “Besides, I moved with the utmost zeal on the smoothest surface, on…
Heavy Feather Review 