The Threepenny Review – Spring 2004

Anne Carson, Gary Shhteyngart, and Mark Doty, all in this issue! There’s also a wonderful story (“The Red Fox Fur Coat”) by Teolinda Gersao, translated from the Portuguese by Margert Jull Costa, who also contributes a translation of an essay on Faulkner by Javier Marías, outstanding book essays by P.N. Furbank (on Geoffrey Hill’s Style and Faith) and Rachel Cohen (on a new edition of Rilke’s Letters On Cézanne), and C.K. Williams on Lowell’s Collected Poems, comparing poets to composers: “…that there are elements in the poems that I don’t care for, or even have to forgive, is incidental to the elemental experience of being taken again by Lowell’s singularly gratifying music.” The prose is accompanied by marvelous poems.

Anne Carson, Gary Shhteyngart, and Mark Doty, all in this issue! There’s also a wonderful story (“The Red Fox Fur Coat”) by Teolinda Gersao, translated from the Portuguese by Margert Jull Costa, who also contributes a translation of an essay on Faulkner by Javier Marías, outstanding book essays by P.N. Furbank (on Geoffrey Hill’s Style and Faith) and Rachel Cohen (on a new edition of Rilke’s Letters On Cézanne), and C.K. Williams on Lowell’s Collected Poems, comparing poets to composers: “…that there are elements in the poems that I don’t care for, or even have to forgive, is incidental to the elemental experience of being taken again by Lowell’s singularly gratifying music.” The prose is accompanied by marvelous poems. In particular, I loved “Five Year Plan,” by Victoria Chang. The pièce de résistance: Carson’s Stein-like “How to Like ‘If I Had Told Him A Completed Portrait of Picasso’ by Gertrude Stein”: “If she told us we would like it. Yes we would. Or at least I do. To complete a portrait is to learn to like your likeness albeit miraculously and never more than three.” I count on The Threepenny Review for intelligent, unexpected, and stimulating work. Here it is. [The Threepenny Review, P.O. Box 9131, Berkeley, CA 94709. E-mail: [email protected]. Single issue $7. http://www.threepennyreview.com] – SR