Vi Khi Nao, born in Long Khanh, Vietnam in 1979, came to the United States when she was seven years old. In her book, The Old Philosopher, she has given us poems in vigorous experimental language. Reading through the book the first time, there is a feeling of a balanced worldly eye, even as the pervasive indistinctness of mixed and matched images/metaphors leaves a sense of no orientation. By the third reading, the seemingly unmoored fragments begin to come into focus: the book feels like the interlacing of two cultures initiated by the wreckage of the Vietnam War.

British academic and writer John Sutherland lost his sense of smell three years ago during hay fever season. George Orwell (nee Eric Arthur Blair) apparently suffered from an acute sensitivity to smells, called nasal hyperaesthesia. Pair the two conditions, and Sutherland seized a new way of thinking about Orwell. He cites a quote from Orwell’s book The Road to Wigan Pier, which “contains the four words that have hung like an albatross around Orwell’s neck: ‘The working classes smell.’” From this was born Orwell’s Nose: A Pathological Biography, to be released this year.

Michael Donhauser is an accomplished Austrian poet, essayist, and critic whose books date back nearly thirty years, but he is not widely known to English readers. It makes him a great candidate for Dichten—Burning Deck’s translation series, which brings this rich and varied collection, Of Things (first published in German nearly twenty years ago), to a needed new audience. It’s a dizzyingly varied work, finely translated by Nick Hoff and Andrew Joron. It is philosophically poised but historically informed, personal, scientific, whimsical, and serious—showcasing a real rucksack of literary tools that Donhauser brings into the field with him to sketch, like the plein air painter, his subjects.

Wolff’s One Morning— sat in my possession in a very raw state. The captivating parts of the poems were laid out and exposed. It was easy to see the mechanics and the utility of every phoneme and word. This is a highly refined piece of work from a woman very much in control of her craft. The level of Rebecca Wolff’s control shines through in the entire piece. There is juxtaposition in each sentence and stanza. “Traveller, / Your journey has been long // and sectional.” Those introductory lines in “Arcadia (et in . . . est)” bear the weight of repetition. They are full of heart and compassion, yet still quite cerebral. There are always dualities to be explored and explained. Wolff demonstrates the relation between the two as often as she can locate it: “By night everything seems impossible // By day, by extension, everything: possible.”