Our Lushing Max

A review of the new August Kleinzahler.

Charles Bernstein: "My work Veil has an epigraph from Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil." The minister who veils his face in the story gives this explanation for his veil: "There is an hour to come when all of us shall cast aside our veils. Take it not amiss, beloved friend, if I were this piece of crape till then." Our bodies veil us from transparency (say, assimilation) and the veil acknowledges that: that we can't communicate as if we had no veils or bodies or histories separating us, that whatever communication we can manage must be in terms of our opacities and particularities, our resistances and impermeabilities--call it our mutual translucency to each other. Our language is our veil, but one that too often is invisible. Yet, hiding the veil of language, its wordness, its textures, its obstinate physicality, only makes matters worse. Perhaps such veils will be cast aside in the Messianic moment, that utopian point in which history vanishes. On this side of the veil, which is our life on earth, we live within and among the particulars of a here (hear) and now (words that speak of and to our condition of everydayness.)"

The Village Voice poetry round-up.

Cystic Fibrosis Fact: Cystic fibrosis is the most common life-limiting autosomal recessive disease among people of European heritage. In the United States, approximately 30,000 individuals have CF; most are diagnosed by six months of age. Canada has approximately 3,000 citizens with CF. Approximately 1 in 25 people of European descent and 1 in 22 people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent is a carrier of a cystic fibrosis mutation. Although CF is less common in these groups, approximately 1 in 46 Hispanics, 1 in 65 Africans and 1 in 90 Asians carry at least one abnormal CFTR gene.

An audio interview with and a reading by Matthew Thorburn over at the Library of Congress.