29 January 2025
Happy lunar new year. Happy year of the snake.
“He understands the power of books, but doesn’t appreciate literature!” my friend Fish exclaimed. This was some summer in the early 2010s at Fish’s house in the rural reaches outside the town of Dali, in the province of Yunnan, China. We’d met in 2005 through a mutual friend, a San Franciscan who dated him briefly and gave him his English name “Fish,” a pun on his Chinese name, which has the surname Yu—I forget which one—and a “tou” in there. So, “Fish Head,” or “Fish,” for short. He is a talented writer, avid reader, and inspired, inspiring conversant. We only spent a few evenings together, but they were so memorable that I had to reach out when I was planning a vacation to Yunnan to show Mary (my then partner and now spouse) the places that had meant so much to me. Even though Fish hadn’t heard a single word from me since that last besotted night in 2005, his friendliness and hospitality knew no bounds when he got my query.
We were eating dinner in his compound. The centerpiece was spicy fish soup (he loves fish!) made from this beautiful carp his fishmonger caught just down the road from Erhai Lake. Veggies and ground pork, rice, bread. We—Fish, his wife Alice, Mary, and I—were talking literature and China and sometimes Chinese literature. A hermit of heightened emotions, Fish reveres classical Chinese literature and scorns its modern progeny, which he attributes to the Cultural Revolution. I then asked a question I’ve thought of more than once: how could Mao Zedong—someone who learned so much from a library, a dedicated librarian, and a radical library activist—ultimately call for the heavy-handed censorship and stringently doctrinal publishing practices that characterized the Cultural Revolution? “It’s because he understands the power of books, but doesn’t appreciate literature! When you see photos of his office,” Fish continued, “it’s all lined with books, everywhere, but he doesn’t care about literature! Have you read his poetry?” As he spoke, he flung beads of chili oil this way and that, chopsticks delicately holding fish vertebrae all the while.
Although the comparison can only go so far, Amazon began its ascent to world domination by understanding the power of books. Anytime anybody laments the current death and irrelevance of the book, to me, I point out that Amazon started its empire with algorithms built out purely on book consumption. And the comparison with the incipient AI training can go slightly further: they—AI programs and companies—understand the power of books, but don’t—can’t—appreciate literature. The irony, dissembling, and proliferation of meaning essential to figurative language must be chastened to suit the demands of AI training. (Mao’s poetry was wildly successful as propaganda, after all.) “Uninventive prose and poetry could be produced by humans and computers alike; of course this is the case,” Laurent Dubreuil concluded from his scientific experiment about AI and poetry, as reported in his recent essay in Harper’s.
The adjective is the key here. When I think of Fish’s trenchant statement, I don’t think of “appreciate” in terms of cultivating cultural cachet, “fodder for cocktail parties,” as an associate professor quipped was a primary objective for the Intro to Literature class we graduate students in the room were to teach. “Appreciate,” rather as a sophisticated, attentive engagement with a text’s inventive language to demonstrate how powerfully the mind can think when aided by writing. The means by which readers get to see this engagement is criticism, and the home turf for such work in a literary publication is the book review section. As Walter Benjamin says at the beginning of one of his book reviews, “New Things about Flowers” (1928):
Criticism is a convivial art. A healthy reader doesn’t give a fig for the reviewer’s judgement. But what he really appreciates is the delightful bad habit of keeping abreast of things, uninvited, while someone else reads. To flip open a book in such a way that it beckons like a ready-laid table, at which we take a seat, along with all our ideas, questions, convictions, quirks, prejudices and thoughts, such that the few hundred readers (is it really so many?) in this society vanish and, on account of that, we get well fed and watered—that is criticism. At least, the only sort that makes a reader hungry for a book. (tr. Esther Leslie)
In this spirit, I’m excited to announce the inauguration of the Georgia Review critic-at-large, starting with Tope Folarin. My goal is that every year we will have one critic write a review for each issue, and we will follow him/her/them. Years ago when I discovered Gerald Weales’s annual American Theater Watch column in GR from 1978 to 2010, I thought it would be nice to have a formal way for GR readers to follow a critic’s mind at length. The idea returned during an advisory group meeting for the NEA, Poetry Foundation, and Smithsonian initiative Maps to the Next World, during which fellow advisor Tope talked eloquently about the value of book criticism. I pitched the opportunity to Tope, and he graciously accepted. Tope’s criticism has been featured in places like The Atlantic, The Drift, the New York Times, and Vulture. He is author of the novel A Particular Kind of Black Man, the executive director of the Institute for Policy Studies, and Lannan Visiting Lecturer at Georgetown University. He has won the Caine Prize, the Whiting Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the NEA, among other awards. I’m honored to have him be our first critic-at-large.
Elsewhere in the issue, please check out the excerpt of Spring Ulmer’s moving elegy for Tortuguita, the activist who was killed by police while protesting construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center (widely known as “Cop City”). I wanted to start 2025 off with a sense of the forest defenders’ continued liveliness in the woods. Mike Scalise also shares a poignant piece about a loved one’s passage from this corporeal world to what’s next, a meditation on artfulness between word and image. Rick Barot shares quietly magisterial prose poems indebted to C. P. Cavafy. Azaria Brown gives us a high-octane one-woman show of someone desperately trying to retain personhood at a soul-sucking company. Check out Julie Enszer’s moving poems, perhaps for the trio of them that gives us a sense of what it’s like to be a Michigander moving to Florida. Yxta Maya Murray has a gripping story that puts into play points of view on natural stewardship that differ drastically between generations. Theo Meranze reviews a major ecofeminist exhibition at The Brick (Los Angeles), and Tope looks at Legacy Russell’s Black Meme.
From around the office:
• Thank you, all, who came to our reading with Aaliyah Bilal. The polar vortex threw us for a loop, a number of times, but all our lovely collaborators and so many of you lovely Athenians stuck with us for a packed house. Thanks to Avid Bookshop, the Athens Public Library, and the UGA Institute for African American Studies for helping us make this event happen.
• Congratulations to Rochelle Johnson for winning the Georgia Review Prose Prize with her essay “Phantom Pains”! As judge Allegra Hyde wrote, “The essay offers such profundity, such wisdom, through frank and compassionate engagement with uncertainty, unknowingness, and grief. Weaving together the experience of amputation with the experience of teaching in the face of a devastating and unrelenting environmental crisis, ‘Phantom Pains’ takes readers on the journey of enduring loss, but also of rebuilding community and connection. I finished the essay feeling both moved and inspired.” Congratulations as well to Rosa Boshier González, whose “2nd Dad” was designated best short story. The two pieces will appear in our Winter 2025 issue. We thank everybody who participated.
• This year’s Loraine Williams Poetry Prize is live now through 15 May. The judge is Pulitzer winner Brandon Som. The winning poet will receive $1,500 and featured finalists $200. All submissions are considered for general publication as well.
• We are looking forward to AWP. If you stopped by our booth or attended our off-site event, thanks!
• We will also be at the New Orleans Poetry Festival in April and hope to see some of you there.
G.M.
