Readers of Sven Birkertsʼ Editorʼs Notes in AGNI will be familiar with the value he places on contemplation. Whether his subject is the Jeopardy face-off between man and machine or cyber-fantasia, he studies it with a mode of thought often associated with religious orders. Birkerts established his reputation by questioning our deep reading sensibility in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. This 1994 text fears a digital mind-warping metamorphosis could send the literary eye wayward as a stray cursor. In his ninth and most recent collection The Other Walk: Essays, he continues to make a case for focus, but by making a “right instead of left” on his habitual walk, illustrating that attention transcends media.
In The Collective, the most recent installment of the American campus novel, Don Lee presents a group of Asian American artists whose coming-of-age is marked by an irresolvable conflict: the tug-of-war between self-identity and community. For the members of the 3AC (or Asian American Artists Collective), the process of self-discovery isn’t so much about finding an identity as it is about confronting the identities that are, somewhat inescapably, chosen for them—identities based on politics, race, and the expectations that come with belonging to a minority community.
Last Nostalgia Starting with a Piece of Spider Plant on our Car’s Backseat
You moved clippings of your childhood spider plant
with us in a Ziploc half-filled with tap water
…
Three Poems
Prayer
I am telling you, first of all, that your husband will be beautiful, but he will be a man who will love you then stand out on the stoop, the red eye of a cigarette sighing between his lips, his shoulders slumped as he sucks smoke in a state of unexplainable melancholy.…
An Arch Under the Instep: Sven Birkertsʼ The Other Walk
Readers of Sven Birkertsʼ Editorʼs Notes in AGNI will be familiar with the value he places on contemplation. Whether his subject is the Jeopardy face-off between man and machine or cyber-fantasia, he studies it with a mode of thought often associated with religious orders.…
The Ivy Power: Don Lee’s The Collective
In The Collective, the most recent installment of the American campus novel, Don Lee presents a group of Asian American artists whose coming-of-age is marked by an irresolvable conflict: the tug-of-war between self-identity and community.…
