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It’s 1977, about five years after Bettina Grossman moved into the Chelsea Hotel and eleven years since a devastating studio fire in Brooklyn Heights reduced much of her work to ashes. Sitting in her room on the fifth floor, she looks out on 23rd Street with her camera, continuing her ritual as the city’s oblique witness.
Is there more meaning in our deaths than in our lives? Cyrus Shams—orphan, recovering addict, poet, and the protagonist of Kaveh Akbar’s ambitious and expansive debut novel Martyr!—is on a quest to find out.
In your room everything is / least as it can be and still / remain a thing.
How does one derive and then develop and sustain a transcendent identity in abstraction? This is the overarching narrative in Richard Shiff’s monograph on one of the most inventive American abstractionists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in Jack Whitten: Cosmic Soul, published by the artist’s gallery, Hauser and Wirth, in 2022.
It’s almost a punchline at this point: every writer is a little in love with and a little afraid of Anne Carson. Perhaps less with Carson herself (who is famously private, and allergic to the spotlight) and more with what she gets away with: living an unquestioned life of the mind on the page.